The Wickham Experiment
by NellyN
Summary: September 1995. When Scully gets a call in the middle of the night from an old friend, she doesn't hesitate to help. Five hours later, the friend is dead under suspicious circumstances, and Scully is missing. As Mulder searches for her, he begins to unravel a larger mystery. Is a nuclear disaster imminent in North Carolina? Or is something even more sinister afoot?
1. 10:13

_Dana Scully's Residence_  
_Annapolis, MD_  
_September 15, 1995_

The call came at exactly 10:13 p.m.

Scully knew, because she was lying in bed, looking at the clock, trying to will herself into sleep. Her cell phone chimed. Then it chimed again. Scully tucked her hair behind her ears and sat up straight and cradled the phone between her ear and her shoulder. She hadn't expected a call, but it still felt like a relief. Like a part of her had been waiting, and that's why she hadn't been able to sleep. "Mm? What is it?"

Silence on the line.

Scully rubbed her eyes. "Mulder?"

Another long pause. "No. It's, uh. It's Chandler."

A name from the past. Not Quantico. Not even medical school. This was early, early days. She was twenty-two again. Physics at the University of Maryland. Rewriting Einstein. _To comprehend the fundamental structure of all that is_. Oh, the things you didn't know, she thought at her younger self. She would write a different senior thesis now. That was for sure. "Chandler," she murmured, like it was the answer to a quiz-show question. She cleared her throat, put on her professional phone voice. "Wickham. How are you?" There was no doubt in her mind that he was Chandler Wickham, Ph.D., by now, probably prosperous, with kids and money. He had always been that kind of guy. Traditional. Her investigator's instincts percolated to the surface and she frowned. "How did you get this number?"

"Listen," said Chandler. "You know that favor you owe me?"

"Uh-huh…" said Scully, warily. It had been a little thing, some college thing, but she remembered telling him, _You're a lifesaver_. She remembered making elaborate college-girl promises. _I owe you big time_.

"Look out the window."

She sat up straight in bed, her heart suddenly throbbing, and walked over to her bedroom window. She leaned on the sill and peeked between the blinds. There was a car out there, a black Lincoln, idling under a streetlight. Blacked-out windows. Special plates, but from this distance, she couldn't tell if they were taxi plates, diplomatic plates or government plates. None of these would have surprised her. She glanced over her shoulder at her gun, which was sitting on the bedside table. She weighed the slight embarrassment of treating her service weapon like a security blanket against the possibility of imminent violence. She collected the gun, and put it on the windowsill beside her. But she felt a little bit guilty about it. "What's going on?"

"Oh, good, he's there," said Chandler. "It's a cab. It's OK. I already paid the fare. He's going to take you to Raleigh. To the historic capital. It's in a park. I'll meet you."

Scully peeked through the blinds again. "What's in Raleigh?"

"Not a thing," said Chandler. "It's just where I'm going to meet you."

"Chandler—"

"Please," he said. "I can't talk about it on the phone."

"We haven't spoken in more than ten years," said Scully.

"I know," said Chandler. "I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important."

"I have to be at work at eight-thirty."

"Not as much as you need to be in Raleigh right now," said Chandler. "Believe me."

Chandler Wickham, _Ph.D.,_ Scully was thinking. Even when they were undergraduates together, they had already known where they would end up. She was going to medical school. And Chandler—well, he'd gone to MIT, hadn't he? They'd fallen out of touch after he moved to Cambridge. She rubbed the back of her neck. What had he gone to study?

She froze. It was engineering, of course. Nuclear engineering.

Scully licked her lips. "Where _did_ you get this number, Chandler?"

"From a United States Senator."

"Give me a name."

Silence. "Maxine Claypool. She's on the intelligence committee."

"OK," said Scully. "I need to get dressed. Tell the cabbie to wait."

Chandler disconnected.

Scully stood there in the dark for a moment, then started to dial her partner's number. It wasn't a big elaborate procedure or anything. All she had to do was press the star key and the number 2. It was like that with her and Mulder: speed dial, carpooling, keys to each other's apartments. The city demanded it of you. The job demanded it. If you didn't make good friends and keep them close, you were wide open. Not that she minded. Being woken in the middle of the night, the luxury cab, intelligence committee, _be in Raleigh in two hours_; that was the kind of thing Mulder lived for. It would be like giving him a present. A surprise.

But before she could press _send_, the phone rang in her hand.

It was Chandler again. "You can't tell anyone."

"My partner," Scully protested.

"No," said Chandler.

"Look," said Scully. "Whatever's going on, he can help you."

"Nobody can help me," he said, and it sounded like he meant it.

He hung up again, leaving Scully alone in her apartment, with a decision to make.


	2. Poison

_J. Edgar Hoover Building_  
_Washington, D.C._  
_September 16_

He wasn't worried at nine, but he couldn't settle either.

He put his feet on the desk, then put them on the floor, and got coffee twice, and pretended to do the crossword in the newspaper. It was a _USA Today_. He got stumped on three down. The clue was, _not the ground, _and it was three letters, but he simply couldn't bring himself to write _sky_. In Fox Mulder's universe, life simply didn't work like that.

He called her at nine-seventeen, first on her cell, then at home. Nobody answered.

He wasn't worried at ten. Not really. He got a stack of X-Files from the file cabinet but didn't bother to check the file names before he read them, and after he was finished, he couldn't remember a word.

At ten forty-five, the office phone rang, and he picked it up, and then dropped it, and then picked it up again. "Yeah?"

"Is this Mulder?"

It was a woman's voice, but not Scully's. "Why?"

"This is Melba Maybourne the accounting department. I need to talk to somebody about these two-twenty-ones. There are some discrepancies. We're very concerned."

Two-twenty-ones. Those were reimbursement forms for out-of-state travel. "I'm sorry," said Mulder. "You've got the wrong number. You're looking for the other Fox Mulder. One 'l'. You might try calling the FBI." He hung up.

He drummed his fingers on his desk for a moment, staring at the phone. After about five minutes of that, he got up and stretched his legs. Then he thought, _there's no harm in asking_, and left the office. He got halfway up the stone stairwell when he collided with someone coming the other way. He bit his lip sharply and had to catch himself on the railing. When he looked up he met the stony stare of his nominal boss, Assistant Director Walter Skinner.

Mulder grimaced and pressed the back of his hand to his lip. "Morning, sir."

"Agent Mulder. I was just coming to see you." He didn't look very happy about it.

"What can I do for you, sir?" Mulder was extra earnest. The two of them had reached détente in the last few months, and Mulder saw no reason to mess with it. The goal was to hoard Skinner's patience and endurance over long periods, so it could be used up when it really counted.

"Are you aware that Agent Scully did not report to work this morning?"

Mulder evaluated this question. "I thought she might be late."

"She didn't call in," said Skinner.

Mulder fixed his gaze somewhere over Skinner's shoulder "That's very unlike her, sir."

"Yes," said Skinner. "I thought so too."

A silence settled between them. Mulder thought: _he knows what happened to her. _He let his dealing-with-Skinner manner drop and met Skinner's eyes. Skinner always looked kind of like he'd just found a finger in his chili, and his tone of voice could peel paint, but that was typical with FBI senior management. That hard, stressed expression was issued by the FBI immediately after the first departmental budget meeting. Mulder judged his boss's actual state of mind by the depths of his crow's feet and the bags under his eyes. And they were deep and dark today.

Skinner had been woken up early—maybe by a phone call?—and informed of that something bad had happened. Not a death. If it was that, Mulder would be called up to the AD's office and Skinner would sit him down and say something formal like, _We've had some very bad news_. He wouldn't trudge down to the basement for a _tête_-à-_tête_. Mulder felt a stabbing pain in his jaw.

Skinner said, "She's in North Carolina."

Mulder dispensed with silly questions like _why_ and skipped right to the meat of the issue. "Is she all right?"

Skinner rocked his head from side-to-side in a doubtful gesture. "That's a complicated question."

But of course, if you had to answer it like that, it wasn't a complicated question at all. It was the opposite. It _implied_ things, and Mulder didn't like the look of it. He turned around and started back down the stairs, thinking about North Carolina. It was a big state, and there was a lot of country in it. Thick forests. Out on the coast it was still practically the mid-Atlantic, but once you got about sixty miles inland, you might as well be in Alabama. But there were certain things that might draw Scully there. The Research Triangle. Duke University's medical school and hospital. Chapel Hill. Yes, if all he would ever have to go on was _North Carolina,_ he would start his search for Scully in Raleigh and Durham. They were fairly familiar places to him.

He felt Skinner's heavy hand on his shoulder. "Wait."

Mulder turned.

"She's not hurt," said Skinner. "As far as I've heard. But she's in some trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"I'm not entirely sure," said Skinner.

He paused, to give Mulder the opportunity to spill the details. Everything was a negotiation with them. It was calibrated. Give a little, get a little. So if Mulder knew anything, now would be the opportunity to give it up. If Mulder refused to cooperate, it would tell Skinner something about the depth and nature of the problem. If he spilled the beans and asked for help, likewise. Either way, it would settle the question of whether they would be allies or enemies on this case, and establish the terms of the treaty.

If Mulder knew anything. But he didn't. He ran his hands through his hair. "She's not on an X-File. We closed out the hot dog case on Tuesday. We've got nothing on the docket. Anyway, she'd call me."

One way, or the other. Allies, or enemies.

"She'd call me," Mulder repeated.

In the end, it wasn't much of a conflict. Skinner liked Scully. Scully was a likable person. She still gave a damn about what other people thought of her, and she was still in a position to earn their respect. Mulder did not think of himself as a shy man, but he had to go out of his way to deal with people. He had to work at it. Scully made it look easy. So there was that, weighing in on the _allies_ side of the scale.

Then they both heard a sound at the top of the cement stairwell. Like a rustling. Like maybe someone was standing at the top, just beyond Mulder's field of vision, eavesdropping. For Mulder that was just ordinary paranoia and he tried not to let it influence his life in undue ways, but Skinner set his jaw. The expression put them on the same side. A common enemy.

"Let's not do this in the building," said Skinner.

_So it's that kind of problem_, Mulder thought.

Skinner told him, "Go up to the third floor and request a car. Pick me up in the parking garage."

Mulder tried not to let himself imagine a shifting silhouette at the top of the stairs. He leaned in and lowered his voice. "How bad is it?"

"Well," said Skinner. "The person who told me about it works for the Raleigh police department. Homicide Division. Relax, agent. She wasn't the victim."

#

The logistics department gave Mulder the worst car in the pool. It was a low-riding black Buick with a dented door, a gummy transmission, and four antennas. It had seen its best days busting hippies and staking out the Black Panthers back in 1975. He could have gone out in a black-and-white patrol car and been less conspicuous. It said FBI like it was wearing a fedora.

Mulder waited for ten minutes in front of the elevators, and then Skinner hopped in the passenger seat and gestured for Mulder to go somewhere that wasn't so thick with FBI guys. It was the middle of the day in D.C., and that was like rush hour with sandwiches. Mulder drove to the Mall, and then started driving around it, the whole rectangle, going tourist speeds. You could have a whole meeting without ever paying for parking.

Mulder took a deep breath, and prepared himself for bad news. "Give it to me."

"Early this morning," Skinner said, "Agent Scully was taken into custody in connection with a suspicious death." Skinner passed a manila file to Mulder. Not an X-File, or even a top-secret file. Just an ordinary file. Mulder held the steering wheel with his knees and opened it. It was an eight-by-ten color picture of a dead man. He'd been white, about thirty-five, dark hair, a bit overweight, not remarkably handsome, not particularly ugly.

He'd died ugly though, though. The skin around his lips and cheekbones was dusky blue, and there was a pink crust around his mouth. His eyes were wide open and bloodshot. He'd fought for that last breath. Pictures of the dead came with the territory, of course, and Mulder had been doing this for more than a decade. In fact he had built his adult life around looking at pictures like this. Studying them. But he knew this one would come back to him a few times before he was able to let it go.

The picture was the only thing in there. No autopsy report, no case notes written in cop scrawl.

"Mulder," said Skinner.

Mulder looked up and braked sharply. A school group crossed in front of them. Middle-schoolers, all wearing the same neon green T-shirts. Skinner and Mulder pretended to watch them.

"What do they think she did to him?" Mulder asked.

"They don't think she did anything. She's the one who called 911 when it happened. She was a material witness. It was voluntary. More or less."

"Was?"

"According to my friend at the Raleigh PD," said Skinner. "About five minutes after that picture was taken, a group of men came to the station. They showed ID—"

Mulder felt a cold thing in his chest. He knew where this was going. "What ID?"

"Does it matter?"

Mulder waited.

"They were State Department badges," said Skinner.

Mulder squeezed the steering wheel until his hands hurt. There were a dozen intelligence shops within three hours of Raleigh—and that was if you didn't count the military. You didn't really _feel_ like you were in charge of a government department until you had your own spy agency. The Department of Education had one. The State Department had at least three. Would a metro cop be able to tell one badge from another at five in the morning?

Would they care?

"I know." Skinner shrugged. "They took the body."

"What was their reasoning?"

"What do you think? National security."

Mulder put the car back in gear. They took another wide, slow bend, passing the capitol. "And they took Scully too. They kidnapped a federal agent. Right out of a police station in the United States of America." He swallowed. _A missing woman_. Scully. This was not going to be easy. "Is that what you're telling me?"

"You know what it's like," said Skinner. "Oklahoma City. The thing at the World Trade Center in '93. The Unabomber. The rules are changing, Mulder. Every day. Nobody wants to be the guy holding the bag when some nutjob drives a fertilizer truck up Pennsylvania Avenue. Someone says 'national security,' you say, 'how can I help.' Or the Raleigh police do. Especially if it takes a problem off their hands."

_A problem._ Was that how they saw it? "Did they say where they were taking her?"

Skinner was silent.

Mulder tried a different approach. "OK. Do we know who the victim is?"

Skinner nodded. "Here's where it gets bad."

Mulder hit the brakes again. The Buick's tires squealed. A car almost rear-ended them. Mulder was very angry. "_Here's _where it gets bad?"

"I don't want you to—"

Mulder kept his eyes on the road. "You don't want me to what?"

"I don't want you to try to draw conclusions," said Skinner. "At this point. It is what it is. Don't read anything into it."

"Sure," said Mulder. "Whatever."

"The deceased is a Doctor Chandler Wickham."

"Should that mean something to me?"

"Maybe," said Skinner. "He was a physicist. Well-known in his field."

_One of Scully's people_, Mulder thought. _A scientist._

"He worked at North Carolina State. A full professor. But he was on sabbatical. He got a consulting job."

"With who?"

Skinner paused for a moment. He weighed it. He'd been weighing it this whole time. But Mulder would find out eventually, no matter what Skinner did or didn't do. "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency."

Mulder nodded slowly. "Someone says 'national security'."

"Right," said Skinner. "It was like that."

"And what did he do for DARPA?"

"You know," said Skinner. He put his elbow on the window and leaned on his hand. "I ran that down. Before I came to see you. As a favor. Obviously the precise nature of Doctor Wickham's work is classified. But at NC State, he was second in command at the nuclear science department. His colleagues think he went to work on the next generation of nuclear weapons."

Mulder let the car idle for a moment, while the traffic flowed around them, or got backed up and honked. Eventually the Capitol Police would tell them to shove along, but with the four antennas and the dented door, and two guns and two badges in the car, Mulder wasn't too worried about it. He was thinking about Scully, with her undergraduate degree in physics.

"Don't read into it," Skinner repeated. "It's not worth the places it takes you. Not without more information. Believe me."

Did Scully know Wickham? Was that the connection?

His instinct was to go straight down to Raleigh and started kicking down doors until he found her behind one of them. But that wasn't Scully's way. _It's delicate_, she'd say. The DARPA-Wickham-nuclear stuff made it weird and dangerous. Stay on the paper side of things, she'd say. Do the safe stuff first. You have to do it anyway, and it might point you in the right direction. Start with Wickham. His face. What could do that to a guy?

Could radiation sickness manifest like that?

He didn't know. It wasn't his area of expertise at all. It wasn't even an X-File. It was a missing persons case. It was regular police work that anyone with a good pair of shoes and a sufficient amount of obstinacy could do. But Scully would count on him to do it. She would expect him to come get her. He knew, because he had been on Scully's side of the equation before. Mulder would rise up out of his own grave to work this case.

Skinner knew it, and so did Scully. And so did he.

Mulder took a deep breath and blew it out through his teeth. He didn't handle stress well. The psychologist in him worried. "Does the Raleigh PD think he was murdered?"

"They don't think it was natural causes. The man was thirty-seven years old."

"Any guesses as to what happened to him?"

"Poison," said Skinner.


	3. Winn some, lose some

_Rowan Tree, North Carolina_  
_September 16 3:50 p.m._

To say missing-girl cases cut close was not fair, Mulder thought.

He carried them a little heavier because of what happened to his sister—that was just basic psychology—but any case cut close enough if you let it. There was no reason that the disappearance of a pretty woman should carry more moral and emotional weight than, say, the sudden death of a prominent scientist. Not in the grand scheme of things.

Scully wasn't in danger. In fact, she was probably learning more than he was about this mess. Scully was an American citizen and a cop; whoever-it-was couldn't sit on her forever. In fact, the clock would probably run out in less than seventy-two hours. They'd have to let her go. It didn't matter if it was the State Department, the CIA, or the President of the United States. She was probably in some small anonymous cell somewhere, facing, at worst, death from boredom.

Right?

The place to start here was with Wickham. If Wickham _was_ working on some kind of weird new Manhattan project, and if he _had_ been murdered, then the case was squarely in federal jurisdiction. Fox Mulder wouldn't be anyone's first choice to solve a politically sensitive national security murder, but he wouldn't have to fight for the case. Even after the many disgraces and indignities of the last few years, he could still lean on his golden-boy rep if he wanted to catch any crime that interested him.

And it did interest him.

Still it wasn't Wickham's death that had drawn him out, and Mulder didn't prepare himself to match wits with a poisoner. He hadn't even gone back to the FBI to file for the case. In fact, in an administrative sense, he'd just abandoned his job without approval or permission. He'd let Skinner off at the mall and broke several speeding laws before he'd even crossed the Beltway. And it wasn't Wickham that consumed his focus or activated his professional instincts. Maybe if he let the line out on it. But to do that he'd have to clear the static. Get out of his own head. That meant he'd have to talk to someone.

And his dance card only had one name on it.

He pulled off the highway at a rural roadside stop. It barely even a real town. He filled the Buick with premium gas, and then went inside, jangling his keys in his hand. At the station he bought a cup of weak coffee for a dollar. The attendant was a tired-looking black man, north of sixty.

Mulder said, "You got any cameras in here?"

The man sized Mulder up and took him-correctly-for a cop. "Security cameras?"

"The little tourist ones," said Mulder.

"Yeah, sure."

"And a map."

Mulder held up two fingers, and the man put two cameras and a thick road map of North Carolina into a paper bag. _Not for a poisoner_. You used cameras to fight an altogether different evil.

The man said, "Seventeen dollars."

Mulder took a twenty out of his wallet. He waited for the change. Then had to ask, because where this town was, because of its strategic location off the highway, because he was here and life was full of coincidences. "Were you here early this morning?"

The attendant scoffed. "Four a.m. every damn day of my life."

"You see a pretty redhead come through here this morning?"

The man smiled. "I wish."

Mulder nodded solemnly. He wished, too.

"Hey," said the guy, "what's the matter? You lose your wife or something?"

"Or something," Mulder said.

It wasn't that the case cut especially close. It was just that everything else in the universe suddenly seemed so far away.

#

_Police Headquarters_ - _Downtown District_  
_Raleigh, NC_  
_4:45 p.m._

The duty sergeant was a big, thick guy, like a bouncer or a football player, a couple of years past his prime. He took one look at Mulder, with his moderately cheap suit and his clean fingernails, all tired and edgy and wrinkled from the drive down from D.C., and formed instantaneous territorial suspicions. Like when a lion and a lynx meet each other at the watering hole. Different species of the same kind of animal. The corners of the sergeant's mouth turned down, and he sighed.

In a lot of these city police stations they were going modern, with high technology like telephones, but the revolution hadn't yet reached the Raleigh PD. The sergeant pivoted a half-turn and bellowed. "Hey, Winn, it's one of your feds!"

"Jesus Christ." A petite detective with close-cropped brown hair looked at Mulder from her desk, in the cramped bullpen behind the sergeant's desk. She wore a huge silver revolver under her arm, a .44, like Dirty Harry's. Uncharitably, Mulder wondered how she got her little hand around it. He guessed that she was _Winn_, last name, and not, _Win_, short for Winifred. She was attractive, in a lean, hard way, but she had flint in her eyes and the kind of expression that didn't suffer fools.

She closed her fists on her hips. "What the hell is it with you people today? Did I lose a contest?"

_Southern hospitality_, Mulder thought. Nothing like it.

"Is there someone here who knows Walter Skinner?" Mulder asked. "Anyone."

Winn softened two degrees. "Walt sent you?"

_Walt? _Mulder spread his hands. "Call him if you want." He held out his cell phone. "Number 6 on the speed dial."

She pursed her lips, then beckoned. "You'd better come back here."

Mulder stepped behind the gate and watched awkwardly while Winn cleared stacks of papers from a folding chair beside her desk. She had high cheekbones and a little triangle chin and her face was smattered with freckles. She was in good shape, like a long-distance runner. She wore jeans and a t-shirt and a flannel overshirt, with her gold badge hanging around her neck on a chain. No make-up. Not even lip gloss.

"You got down here pretty quick. What was that, door-to-door? Four hours? Five? You must have hauled ass." She was about twenty-four, high-energy, a bit prickly. The thing with the .44 was cool, but it also suggested a bit of insecurity, a struggle to keep ahead of something. Whether it was the men in her squad or the brutality of the job or something else-like a childhood trauma-Mulder didn't know. But it was something. Of course, you could say that for almost every beat detective and more than one FBI agent. "I wish the IRS handled claims that fast."

Having made space for him, she dropped into her own office chair. She was small enough that she could draw her knees up, folding herself into it. She put her chin on her knees. "It's a territorial thing, right?" She smiled acidly. "State peed in the FBI's pond, so they got the FBI with the strongest chin and the saddest eyes to come down here and sort it out."

"Yeah," said Mulder, perching on the edge of the folding chair. "That's what happened."

"Well, I hope Walt appreciates my snitching," said Winn. "I didn't have to call. I've had enough feds up my nose today."

She seemed incapable of staying still, and after a moment of staring at him, she threw open a desk drawer and took a battered packet of Morleys out of it. She pulled one out of the packet with her teeth and struck it with a silver Zippo, a practiced, anxious gesture. She took in a deep breath of smoke, closing her eyes for a moment to savor it. Then, reading some kind of judgment or assessment in Mulder's eyes, she shrugged. "They're an herbal remedy." She leaned forward and glared daggers at something over Mulder's shoulder. "Get back to work, Chapman," she called. "This isn't performance art."

Mulder looked over his shoulder and met eyes with the duty sergeant. The man turned back to his work.

Winn rolled her eyes, tapped the ash from her cigarette, then sighed. "I'm real sorry you came all the way down here. I can't tell you much more than I told Walt over the phone." She took another hard drag, then gestured elaborately at Mulder with it. "Soon as the stiff's prints hit AFIS, I've got these suits all up in my personal business. They cleaned us out. They took my case notes. Even my witness. I mean, the other FBI. What was it? Scully. It was professional as hell. They even took the damn tape from the security cameras. Like they were cleaning up after a UFO crash or something." She raised an eyebrow.

Mulder tipped his head. "Were they?"

"Yeah," said Winn, looking at him like he was nuts. "Totally."

"Is there a prevailing theory?"

"Lots," said Winn, shrugging. "You know what cops are like."

"What do you think happened?" She seemed bright enough. Maybe she knew.

"Me?" As if nobody had ever asked her that before. "I have no theories. I really don't. I'm going home in twenty minutes and I'm going to try forget this ever happened." Her eyes welled up, and she tucked her face into her elbow and sneezed. "Sorry." She waved it away. "It's 'flu season."

"Why did you call us?" Mulder wondered.

"It's not right, what they did," said Winn. "Someone dies, there ought to be a record. They shouldn't just disappear. It was _spooky." _She shivered. "Plus, these guys were assholes. I mean, most feds aren't exactly dazzling personalities, but this was like a rock band in a hotel room. I mean, it's a bad job anyway. Learn some manners, for Christ's sake." She dropped the cigarette butt in a half-empty coffee cup. It sizzled.

"OK," said Mulder.

He took out the picture of Chandler Wickham. Winn had seen it before and knew what it was. To her credit, she leaned over and studied it again, committing it to memory. The dusky cheeks, the bloodshot desperation in the eyes. She looked up, giving Mulder a grim and empathetic look. Her eyes said, _it's a terrible world we live in, isn't it?_

"Have you ever seen someone die like that before?" Mulder asked.

"I was a beat cop before I got this job," said Winn. "I've seen just about everything before."

"So what was it?" Mulder wondered. "The last time?"

Winn leaned over the photo again. She grimaced and lit another cigarette. "Strychnine. A woman did it." She closed the manila file with a finger, her brown eyes going still and far-away. "She put it in the guy's oatmeal." And then she seemed to snap the hymnal closed. She shook her head and sneezed in her sleeve again. "Is that all? Cause it's getting around to five, and I've got a boyfriend and a dog and a nice baby waiting for me at at home."

Mulder didn't know if she was serious or joking. There were no pictures on her desk, and she wore no rings.

"One more question," said Mulder. "You said they came right after you filed the fingerprints with AFIS."

"Yeah?"

"How long is 'right after'?"

She shrugged. "Half an hour."

So they were _from_ here. Raleigh guys. "OK," said Mulder. He gathered up Wickham's file. "Give the dog a Milk Bone for me."

"Yeah, sure," said Winn, cracking another sharp smile. "Can I ask what you're gonna do now?"

"Me?" said Mulder. He checked his watch. "I need to go see a man about a bomb."

Winn was unfazed. She turned back to a stack of paperwork. She paused and blinked for a moment, then shook it off. "Just keep it out of my jurisdiction, FBI."

Mulder stepped into a cool September evening. A lot to like there, he thought. But for someone else. She exhausted him.


	4. With one hand tied behind his back

_Whispering Pines Motor Court  
Raleigh, NC  
7:15 p.m._

When Mulder checked in, with a small bag of office supplies from the NC State bookstore and nothing else, the woman at the desk recognized him. Not as a type, but him, personally. She did a double take.

It took Mulder a moment to recall why. Then he remembered: he and Scully had spent about four days here babysitting a Federal witness with the improbable name of Dash Kearns. Dash had never quite made it to court. But he had cost the Whispering Pines Motor Court one desk, six square feet of cheap carpet, a couple of gallons of paint and a door. In Mulder's experience, the hospitality industry took a dim view of that kind of thing, but the stars had aligned when this motel filed its complaint. Uncle Sam had opened his wallet, cash and apologies had flowed, and management began to look forward to the FBI destroying a few of its rooms every year.

It's the little things you do for people that make a difference in this life.

"Two rooms, right?" said the clerk.

Mulder held up one finger, and the clerk frowned.

She tapped on the keyboard, frowned again, and handed Mulder a key. "Take six. There's a fifty dollar deposit. Against phone calls and the TV. We've got HBO now." She squinted at him. "Playboy Channel."

"All the comforts of home," said Mulder.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Moments later, he let himself into the room, closed the door behind him, put his gun on the bedside table, and sat on the bed. The room had dark carpet that smelled of mildew, a heating unit with a squeak, dim lighting, ugly art. Big government largesse at its finest. Mulder had spent a good part of his adult life in rooms just like this one. From time to time he had found them comforting. Life stripped down to its bare essentials. Instant home base, anywhere in the country. Mulder heard that there were these punks who cooked drugs in motel coffeepots. The image of some businessman—or some mild-mannered FBI agent—making his morning coffee and getting the trip of a lifetime amused Mulder a bit. Not that he believed it; it wasn't much more credible than the one about the body in the box spring. But it was _possible_. At the moment, though, he felt a little bit like he was sitting inside a crime scene.

The silence was stifling. He hadn't spoken to his partner in over eighteen hours.

The heater shook and squeaked. Mulder put his hands on his knees.

"OK," he said, to nobody at all. "Time to go to work."

#

First he made two phone calls. One was short and the other was long.

Then he got up on a chair and hung the map of North Carolina on the wall. He secured the corners with pushpins, and then stuck a red pushpin in the approximate location of Raleigh police headquarters. He cut about five inches of string from a roll. He took one end and tied it to the pushpin. He tied the other end to a Sharpie, then drew the pencil in a circle around the map. Everything inside the circle was within forty-five miles of Winn's station.

Scully's kidnappers had come from somewhere inside that circle.

She could be inside that circle. For all Mulder knew, she could be in the room next door. Or she could be in Hong Kong by now. No way to tell.

He took out the picture of Wickham and pinned it to the map, outside the circle. Then he opened a package of Post-its with his teeth. On one he wrote _strychnine? _and stuck it to the picture of Wickham. On another he wrote _rock band__ in a hotel room (4-6 men)_ and stuck it to the map. He added another beside it that said, _professionals_. Finally, he wrote, _nuclear weapons_ and put it on the map. Then he took a moment to survey the geography.

There was one thing he hadn't put on the map yet.

He took it out of his pocket. It was a leaf. It was not a pretty green leaf or a crisp fall leaf, though both were in abundance in North Carolina at this time of year. This leaf had strange ripples on its surface. An rainbow of oil-slick colors crept up the stem and stained the green part. The edges were singed. It looked a little bit like someone had stuck it in a microwave for a few minutes, and this was not far from the case. Mulder had gotten it from a scientist at the Applied Atomic Sciences department at North Carolina State University.

#

"What d' you know about nuclear weapons?" A frighteningly young postgrad named Bradley Amos had asked Mulder that evening.

Brad was earnest and blue-eyed, and he had bleached and spiked the top half of his head. He shared a closet and a desk with two other elementary school students who were both Chinese immigrants. Together they made up the working class of Applied Atomic Sciences. Chandler Wickham had been the department's aristocrat. He had a much larger office around the corner. Mulder had already taken a look at it. It had been neat and sparse, appropriate for a lean-living physicist who had left four months ago for a fatter paycheck and the pride of public service.

"Assume that I don't know anything." Mulder had squeezed into the four inches of empty space between the door and the desk. This put him at eye-level with a set of postcards depicting the testing of atomic weapons in the desert, back in the 1950s. ATOMIC SUNRISE. GREETINGS FROM THE NEVADA TEST SITE.

"Good," said Brad. "I was going to tell you to forget it all anyway." He tapped one of the postcards. A black and orange mushroom cloud. The worst fear. "Everyone thinks it's still like this. _Doctor Strangelove_. _On the Beach_." Brad tipped his head back and forth. "The risk is still there, I guess. We've still got the missiles. But this has much of a relationship to the modern nuclear arsenal as… as this does to the first computers." He took a compact cell phone from his pocket. "It's not the Cold War anymore, Agent Mulder. In ten years all our missile silos are going to be yuppie survivalist condos and paintball courts—thank God. But we're not getting out of the nuclear business. We can't. We're diversifying."

Brad had showed Mulder some interesting things.

The same technology that had promised global annihilation on a hair trigger just four years ago was being harnessed in ways large and small, for purposes both sweet and sinister. Brad showed Mulder a device the size of a pack of cards that, when armed, could disable every electronic system in a thirty-story building in less than a second. Nuclear power plants the size of municipal garbage cans would drive the next generation of submarines and spacecraft. "And who knows," he said, tutting thoughtfully. "Maybe your kid's school, too." Nuclear imaging allowed people to see through walls—and skulls. Brad's colleague Martin Liu was using his lab time to design a new course of treatment for inoperable brain cancer. "But that's nothing," said Brad. "You want to see something that will blow your mind, I'll show you what Jian is working on."

He led Mulder down a winding set of corridors to a metal door with AAS LAB (BIOLOGY) stenciled on it. He banged loudly on the door. "It's Amos," Brad called.

A loud burst of static came from a small intercom next to the door. A tinny voice snapped, "What? I'm busy."

Amos gave Mulder a _scientists-what're-you-gonna-do _shrug. "Hit the button. I've got another guy in to see the mutants." He arched an eyebrow at Mulder.

The tinny voice said, "Hold on."

After a brief pause, they heard a loud electric buzz from inside the lab. Brad opened the door and gestured for Mulder to enter. Mulder stepped into a large clean room crammed with scientific equipment. A young man in a lab coat and green medical mask pointed at him. "Behind the red line." A moment later he approached and laid a small bundle in Mulder's arms. It turned out to contain a mask, latex gloves and little paper booties to go over Mulder's wingtips. The physicist—Jiang—wouldn't let Mulder cross the red line until he'd suited up.

Feeling just a little bit like Mike Dukakis riding the tank, Mulder did so.

"So where are the mutants?" Mulder wondered.

There were no cages or cells in the room, just a couple of chemistry hoods, half a dozen beige computers and a tall and baffling device. Mulder had to stare at it for nearly a minute before he realized he was looking at a scanning electron microscope. Mulder glanced over his shoulder at Brad, who had not put on the gear. He had stayed behind the red line, slouching against the door.

Brad just smiled. "Give him the politician show, J."

"The mutant is here," said Jiang. He tapped the screen next to the microscope. On it was a black-and-white image made up of tiny linked hexagons. Jiang was a soft-spoken man with a slight accent. His most distinguishing feature was his eyes, which. He had the attitude of politely and patiently indulging a very stupid interloper. _The politician show. _As Mulder took this in, Jiang pounded a red button on one of the chemistry hoods. "And here." The lights in the clean room dimmed, and a series of loud metallic noises emitted from the inside of the hood. Mulder understood that whatever objects were under the hood were being hit with strong blasts of radiation. Jiang hit the red button again. The lights came slowly back up, and Jiang inclined his head at the screen.

The differences were subtle. Microns. But the tiny hexagons had shifted and warped.

"These are wheat seeds," said Jiang, tapping the glass on the hood. "We try to trigger controlled genetic changes in the seed before it germinates."

Mulder was disturbed—and fascinated. "_Why?_"

"My friend Jiang," said Brad, with an air of easy pride, "uses his lab hours to speed up biological evolution."

Jiang sighed at his colleague's hyperbole. "We target specific parts of certain genes," he said. He typed a command into the computer and the microscope pulled back, until they were looking at the fuzzy twists and curls of chromosomes. "Here," said Jiang, gesturing. "And here, this one, here. We change on the genetic level. If the experiment works, we grow a wheat plant that cannot get wheat rust. Stronger wheat. Healthier crops. More food."

Mulder bent down to get a better look at the image. "Has it ever worked?"

"We're very close," said Jiang.

"Yeah? How long have you been _very close_?"

Mulder got the impression that Jiang was chuckling underneath his mask. "Come back to my office," said Jiang. "I'll give you a souvenier. So you can remember me when everyone has bread and nobody has wheat rust."

That was where the strange, warped leaf had come from. Jiang had taken from a desk drawer and pressed it into Mulder's hand. "It's a cherry leaf," said Jiang. "We did some of our early work with cherries."

"Is it radioactive?" Mulder wondered.

Brad said, "No worse than your cell phone."

"Great." Mulder turned the singed leaf over in his hand. "Was Dr. Wickham involved in this project?"

"It was not his particular area of interest," said Jiang. "He supervised many projects."

"Yeah, but could he duplicate this experiment?"

Jiang shrugged."With sufficient equipment..."

Mulder asked the question that had been sitting on the tip of his tongue since he saw the politician show. "Could you do it to a person? Alter their genes?"

"We're decades away from that," said Jiang. He seemed a bit peeved that Mulder had even asked. "This isn't science fiction."

"So why show me at all?"

"We show everyone," said Brad. "It's good for funding." He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. "Listen. Dr. Wickham was a hell of a nuclear scientist. He could probably do just about anything he wanted. But he was a hardware guy at heart. You want to build a Star Trek phaser, you get him. You want to cure cancer, you get Martin Liu. You want to rewrite the genetic playbook, you get Jiang."

Mulder said, "And what about you?"

"What about me?" said Brad.

They were all crammed together in the peasants' office, nearly knee-to-knee. Mulder said, "What do you do?"

The kid gave him an amiable, surfer-dude smile. "Public relations."

#

And that was all Mulder had ever gotten, or ever expected to get, out of the Applied Atomic Sciences department on the subject of Chandler Wickham. The politician show and a radioactive leaf. Mulder pinned the leaf to the map, underneath Wickham's dusky chin.

He had never wanted to talk to a scientist more in his entire life.

And without Scully's perspective, what did he have?

State Department intelligence guys who weren't from State. Nuclear weapons that weren't weapons. A dead scientist who suddenly seemed to in charge of every morally ambiguous Doctor Frankenstein project east of the Mississippi. A pile of suspicions and anxieties with nothing to channel them or anchor them down. And a forty-five mile circle with almost two hundred and fifty thousand people living in it.

"Scully," he said. "We're nowhere."


	5. Triangulation

_September 17_

Mulder doubted he would sleep at all that night. If he allowed his mind to clear and settle, it might bring new insight into the mystery of Wickham's death, but it was more likely that he would travel back to the months when Scully had been taken, and when she was suffering and dying in the hospital. That had been a difficult time. He had not handled it very well, and he knew there were still depths to be plumbed. A smart man would not venture into those deep waters alone and unarmed. These were different circumstances, he knew; despite how little he knew of the situation, his instincts were solid on the issue of Scully's safety. His original impression had not changed. Wickham's death was the end of a thread that led to exposure and embarrassment, but only for the next few days. Any longer than that, and holding Scully became a Constitutional issue; any less than that and they would have let her go, trusting that whatever-it-was would be over before they could mount a serious investigation. If they meant to harm her, they would have stolen two corpses from the Raleigh PD's pathology department.

She was fine. Scully didn't need Mulder's help to handle a few DARPA thugs for two or three days. He knew that by now.

But the dreaming mind was not so trusting—or trustworthy.

Mulder soon found himself in a nasty paranoid dream in which he had returned home, but all of his office furniture was the size of skyscrapers. He had his gun in his hand and he was tracking the smell of cigarette smoke. He pressed his back against an immense file cabined and then stepped aggressively around it, cutting the pie like they taught you at Quantico. But the figure he drew down on was not the Cigarette-Smoking Man, with his implacable malevolence and confidence, but Winn, the young detective from Raleigh police headquarters. She had Wickham's sad and desperate expression. A corpse's eyes. Mulder saw reflected in them the images of tiny mushroom clouds, black and orange and ringed with smoke.

"Sorry." He holstered his weapon. "I think I have the wrong office."

She held her cigarette like she was making a point. "Do you?" She blew a thick cloud of smoke from her mouth.

"Yeah. I'm, uh." He ran his hand through his hair. "I'm not supposed to be here."

"How the hell would you know _that_?" She arched an eyebrow. "I mean, if you look at it from a probability standpoint, everyone is where they're supposed to be."

Mulder squinted. "Huh?"

"Balanced against an infinite universe, your existence is a statistical impossibility. Everyone's is." She shrugged. "But here we all are. In order for reality to continue, you need to be wherever you are. Your physical location is atomic destiny." Her dead, nuclear gaze flicked to something over his shoulder. "Are you gonna get that?"

"Get what?"

"The door," said Winn.

Mulder woke like someone had dumped a gallon of ice-water on him. Someone was banging on the door. Sharp knocks. At first he thought it might be his partner, but that hope was soon dashed.

"Hey, Mulder, open up."

Mulder frowned and padded over to the motel's flimsy door. He threw it open. It was predawn-dark outside, and the air was crisp. Lowering his gaze a little he took in a trio of men. The first impression they made was baffling. He wondered for a moment if he was still asleep. Sadly, no. If there was one thing you could say about the Lone Gunmen, it was that they were quite real. Mulder glanced at the digital clock on the bedside table. 5:41 a.m. He put his face in his hands and rubbed the grit from his eyes. Leaving the door opened, he found his shirt and pulled it on.

The three hackers stood in the doorway.

"We brought your go bag." Byers hefted a small duffel and gave Mulder a soulful, apologetic look.

Langley eyed the room, crossing his arms. "You know this is an FBI hangout."

Mulder nodded. "I've heard that."

"You sweep the room for bugs?"

"No," said Mulder. "I wasn't…" He spread his hands. "I wasn't actually expecting to talk to anyone."

Langley scowled. "Have we taught you nothing?"

Mulder started to speak, and then decided to let that one go.

"You OK, Mulder?" said Frohike.

"Fine." He paused. "What are you guys doing here?"

"Hey, you called us." Frohike pointed out.

This was true. The call to the _Lone Gunmen _office had been the long phone call Mulder had made as soon as he came to the motel. It was his own fault. "Yeah, I didn't expect you to pile in the VW and drive down."

They came into the room, quickly turning it into a mobile version of the Gunmen's own, relatively secure headquarters in Anacostia. Byers shut the door and drew the heavy curtains. Langley found the Gideon's Bible in a drawer and turned it over in his hands. "Hold on." Langley left. When he returned, the Gideon's Bible was gone, and he had a slim laptop under one arm and a surge protector in the other. "Tell me this place has an outlet."

Mulder pointed.

While the Gunmen brought in a small collection of information technology, Mulder explored the contents of the go bag. As a traveling cop, you learned to keep a bag packed. Mulder kept one at work and one at his apartment. This one had already been rifled through once. There were no clean shirts or ties in it. In fact, unless you wanted to shoot hoops, clean a gun or fight vampires, the kit was pretty much tapped out. At least there was a razor in there.

Behind him, Byers applied a small, round device that looked like an earmuff to the phone's receiver. Catching Mulder's eye, Byers said, "In 1965, the KGB perfected the art of turning a phone into a microphone." He tapped the handset. "Why go to the trouble off bugging a room when there's already a receiver in it?"

"Yeah." Frohike was peering up at Mulder's crime wall. He looked over his shoulder. "Three guesses as to who they got that idea from."

"The CIA." Langley unfolded a small gray satellite dish on the motel's tiny desk and plugged it in to his laptop. "Of course." Langley typed something on the computer, then began to calibrate the satellite dish using a compass. "Ha!" he muttered, to himself. "Dial-up is for losers."

"Don't worry. We're not just here for you and Scully," said Byers. "They're having I-Con East this weekend at the convention center. We're doing a presentation on open mesh nodes."

"Wow," said Mulder.

"Don't worry about Scully." Frohike kept staring at the picture of Wickham's corpse. He settled his chin in hand. When he spoke again, his voice was distant. "These guys who took her. They're not very good at their jobs."

"Yeah, they suck." Langley beckoned. "Lemme show you."

Mulder said, "Frohike, if it bothers you, you can take it down."

In the past few years, Mulder had gotten so accustomed to including the Gunmen in investigations that he sometimes forgot that it was like inviting the Boy Scouts to an autopsy. There was an element of cruelty in it. They were civilians, after all.

Frohike murmured, "Hold on." He took the Post-it labeled _strychnine_ from Wickham's picture.

"You know about triangulation, right?" said Byers. "With cell phones?"

The problem with these guys was, you got whiplash. "Yes." Mulder squeezed the bridge of his nose. "I know about triangulation." Every cop and FBI agent did by now. When they first came on the scene, mobile phones had caused a bit of a conundrum for law enforcement. The physical location of a land line was, more or less, a matter of public record. You could hunt down anyone with a phone book and enough persistence. For a couple of years the situation had looked pretty dodgy, until some clever spook realized that all of a sudden, everyone was carrying around their own radio transmitter. As long as someone was within range of at least three cell towers—not a problem, in D.C.—you could not only see where they were, but track them.

"You sure you're OK, Mulder?" Frohike watched him carefully. "Cause you seem a little…"

"Yeah, I'm all right. I just got a headache from being woken up before dawn by the Keystone Cops," said Mulder. Then he realized he was being _a little_. "Look, I just need a minute. And some coffee. I appreciate what you're doing."

"OK." Frohike abruptly left the room.

Langley watched him, then shrugged. "OK, so we have Scully's number." He had pulled up a detailed map. Mulder recognized the Hoover building. Langley pointed at a red dot in its depths. "This is Thursday, end of the day, she's going home." The red dot moved through the building, eventually hitting the metro station and rolling out to Annapolis.

Mulder set his jaw. "You guys shouldn't do that to her."

"We only use our powers for good," Byers assured him.

"Whatever."

Langley continued. "She's at home all night. She gets a call around eleven." The red dot in Scully's apartment lit up, and a phone number appeared next to it." -252-555-0173. "Pretty late, right? But he must be a friend because she leaves right after that." He sped up the tracking. "Five hours later she's here in Raleigh." He pointed at the dot. "She meets up with the dude who called her. Zero-one-seven-three. At four a.m. they're both here together in the park. They have words I guess, but they're pretty short ones, because a few minutes later, she calls 911. OK, so far, so boring. Here's where it gets good."

Langley fast-forwarded through the record. Scully's phone went to the hospital, and then, shortly afterward, to the Raleigh police station. He continued, "Not long after that you got three cell phones coming into the building. They're cheap burners, totally anonymous, like you buy in Wal-Mart." Langley took his own burner phone from his pocket, then pointed at a set of new phones in the police station. "A total dead end. But here's the thing. They're not total morons because they make her turn hers off." The light indicating Scully's phone winked out. "But they're still morons." Langley tapped the screen. "Either that, or they just don't care."

Mulder stared.

The burner phones stayed on.

#

"Where do they go?" Mulder asked.

"Well, it's pretty weird," said Langley.

"How weird?"

Byers said, "It's a place called Lawdon—"

Frohike came back in with an open book in his arms, turning the pages frantically. It was a huge textbook. It rather dwarfed Frohike, and Mulder recognized it. It was called _Forensic Pathology: A Diagnostic Handbook_. He had a copy of it in the office. It was, in all, a gruesome book, providing full-color images of murder victims and other bodies in various states of distress. Not something you'd find at your local public library. Frohike balanced it on one arm, licked his fingers and paged through it. He crossed the room, heading back to Mulder's shrine to the crime.

"Lawdon, North Carolina," Byers continued. "It's on the shore. The place was always kind of miserable. They used to make some kind of special glue there. For upholstery. It was toxic. The factory was shut down and the whole town became a Superfund site. The population dropped by three quarters in a year. It's a ghost town. The only people who stayed are the ones who can't afford to move."

Mulder sighed. "I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately."

"Yeah," said Byers. "They want privacy."

Mulder picked up his go bag and began gathering his other supplies. "We're going to find something there," he declared. "Something big." Despite himself, he felt a little kindle of excitement. "I think I already know what it is."

"No," said Frohike.

Mulder stopped.

"You can't go." Frohike's nose was still in the book.

"Frohike—"

"Listen to me," said the hacker.

"What's up, man?" said Langley.

"We're wrong." Frohike dropped the book on the bed. "About what this is."

The men gathered around it. It was a two-page spread. On one side was a black-and-white image of a man lying in a hospital bed. On the other was a color image of a mummy. They were both very old images. But they still had an effect. The victims had dark patches on their cheekbones. Their lips were pale. And they both had wide and bloodshot eyes.

One by one, the men looked over at the picture of Wickham on the wall.

Mulder glanced up at the chapter heading. _Diseases_.

He cleared his throat. "Frohike, what did these people die of?"

Frohike took a deep breath. He closed his eyes. "Influenza."

"The flu?" said Langley.

"In nineteen-eighteen, there was a worldwide epidemic," said Frohike. "Very contagious. Very deadly. And then it just… stopped. This guy, the mummy, he was an Eskimo. He died in the plague. The CDC dug him up last year." Frohike looked over his glasses at Mulder. "I wrote an article about it."

Byers pulled at his beard. "You know, I think we ought to skip the convention."

"Yeah," said Frohike.

A cold nausea climbed up Mulder's throat. "Where's my phone?"

The Gunmen were silent.

Mulder said, "OK, this isn't silly season. I need my phone back. Now."

The men looked at each other. Then Byers took Mulder's cell phone out of an insulated bag and handed it over. Mulder dialed 411. "I need the number for the Raleigh police. The detective bureau."

"Emergency or non-emergency line?" said the operator.

She'd been sick, Mulder remembered. A little red around the eyes. Sneezing. _I'm sorry, _she'd told him. _It's flu season._

"Emergency," he said.


	6. Atomic destiny

_Reinette Winn's Residence  
Raleigh, NC  
6:15 a.m._

Too late.

Winn's place was a narrow condo in a gated community, within walking distance of the police station. The garage door was open and you could see a little silver BMW Z3 in there. There were only two police cars on the street—a patrol car and a detective's unmarked—and the beat cop was sitting on the stoop. As Mulder pulled up, the cop got to his feet and took heavy steps to the passenger-side window. It was Chapman, the front-desk sergeant.

"You can't stop here," Chapman told him.

Mulder showed his badge. "What happened here?"

"Medical emergency," said Chapman. "She called 911 herself. But when they got here, she was already..." He swallowed. "She didn't make it." He had a thousand-yard stare, and he kept resting his hand on the butt of his gun, not in a threating way, but to make sure it was still there.

"You knew her," Mulder said.

Chapman shook his head. "Not really. She was pretty quiet about her life."

"I'm sorry," said Mulder. He didn't say you need to call the CDC, and he kept on not saying it. If she had died as quickly and dramatically as Wickham, then this whole place would be crawling with disease investigators before you could say hot zone, and Mulder did not intend to be around when the net closed. Not that it mattered much anyway. If it had been in an urban police station, then you couldn't cast a big enough net. "I need to get in there."

"We're not working it as a murder," said Chapman. "Nobody thinks it was murder."

"I don't think so either," Mulder said.

He pulled the Buick in until it hugged the curb, nose-to-nose with the detective's car. He got out and entered through the garage. It was a sad place, cheap and under-maintained, the little "luxury" touches—plastic crown molding, laminate flooring that looked like wood—somehow making it even worse. The furniture was all matched sets, like it was from one of those rent-to-own places. A cop's life. He turned a corner and climbed a steep set of carpeted stairs. The first door he opened led to a cramped bathroom with mildew in the corners. With the end of a pen, Mulder opened the medicine cabinet. Inside were three prescription bottles: lithium, Depakote, valium-as-needed. Mulder's education was in psychology, not psychiatry, but that was a maintenance cocktail for bipolar disorder. Keeping the streets safe for Raleigh at work, white-knuckling her sanity at home. What else was new? At least she was doing something about it. Mulder closed the cabinet and saw himself in the mirror.

A pocket door led to the bedroom.

She was still there.

#

Like Wickham, Winn had died fighting for her last breath, the phone still clutched in her hand. Her eyes were so wide you could see the whites all around. Her jaw was set. Tough girl. _I would have figured it out by now_, Mulder thought. _But you were ten steps ahead of me, Scully. You were already here. You were here yesterday morning. _That was how it had been when Scully was abducted, too. Mulder had kept his head above water for four or five years without any help at all—in Violent Crimes, on the X-Files, everywhere. Then he had gotten used to having a partner. It had ruined him as in independent investigator. Nothing he did by himself had worked the same or as well again.

_If I wasn't working this alone, she might still be alive._

He picked up on a subtle movement and lifted his gaze.

A black detective, about Winn's age, sat in an armchair next to her bed. He was so quiet and still that Mulder had looked at him twice already and not really noticed him. "They think it was some kind of weird pneumonia. They're sending a special meat wagon to pick her up. I'm supposed to wait here." He was wiry, looked and carried himself like an infantry soldier, and he wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses. "You're the FBI?"

Mulder took out his badge.

The detective nodded, "She talked about you. Yesterday was a big day for her."

"I'm sorry," said Mulder.

"That's good," said the young man. "You should be sorry. I hope it keeps you awake at night for the rest of your life." He kept his anger banked low and constant. "We're not stupid, you know. We're not a bunch of backwater Southern hicks. All this started with the FBI and a bunch of classified military bullshit. I don't care what really happened. You might as well have pushed her in front of traffic." He took a deep breath and seemed to get control of himself. He held up a hand. "I'm not going to do this right now. I just want to ask you if you have the brass to stay with her. To stay here and wait and wonder if the same thing is going to happen to you."

"You were her partner?"

The detective's eyes flashed. "Sometimes."

Mulder took a deep breath. "I can't."

"I didn't figure you would," said the detective bitterly.

"It's not like that," said Mulder. "I have someone out there too."

"I could stop you."

"Maybe you should." Mulder turned and left the room. The detective didn't shoot him. He went downstairs. He took his cell phone, looked at for a moment, and put it in the trash compactor. He called his motel room on Winn's kitchen phone. It rang six times, and then Frohike answered.

"It's me," said Mulder. "You need to go see some guys at NC State." He spelled their names. "Consider it an anonymous tip from a well-placed FBI source. And you can stay in the room as long as you want. They have the Playboy channel."

"Mulder, you should come back here."

Mulder nodded. "You're probably right."

"I'm not kidding," said Frohike. "This thing is bad juju. In nineteen-eighteen there were stories of guys who were OK, and then six hours later they were dead."

"It'll be fine," said Mulder. "I'm going to see my doctor right away."

"You don't want to go down in history as patient zero in a global pandemic."

"I'm going to try not to let that happen. Any tips?"

"I don't know. Pray?"

#

Winn had a set of household tools in her garage. Circumstances being what they were, Mulder wasn't interested in going into a department store, so he took a huge pair of bolt cutters and a flashlight and put them in the back of the BMW. Then he took the keys from the hook beside the door and backed the zippy little car out of the driveway.

He beckoned Chapman. "The guy in there. What's his name?"

"Peterson."

Mulder got out and took his go bag from the passenger seat of the Buick and put it in the passenger seat of the BMW. "He any good at his job?"

"He's smart," said Chapman. "On track for fast promotion. But he's wound pretty tight. A lot of the guys don't think he's going to last."

"Tell him my boss is a guy named Walter Skinner and he knew Detective Winn. The two of them can put their heads together on what a huge problem I am. Tell him I'm very sorry I took this car but it's a matter of national security."

Chapman scowled. "You need a silver convertible to protect the country?"

"Yes." Mulder got behind the wheel. "I need to get somewhere very fast."

"Where?"

Mulder put the car in gear and peeled out of the neighborhood.

#

She was in the car with him as he turned east and headed toward the sea. They all were: Winn, Scully, Samantha. This car was where Winn had really lived. She'd had it waxed regularly. Her badge hung on the rear-view mirror. In the glove compartment he found loose ammo for her revolver, and a postcard from a girlfriend in Florida, and a little Moleskine notebook full of motivational quotes. _You are the only person who can make you happy. _The sound system was after-market, and excellent. Winn had put all of her extra cash into this car. The CD was something Mulder had never heard before, a melancholy, heartfelt drawl, heavy on the piano, strong female vocals.

He left it.

The morning had dawned cold and gray with the promise of rain and a cold autumn. Mulder closed the top shortly after he got out on the highway. He wanted a tape recorder, so he would have a record of his thoughts and wild theories. He wanted a shower and a change of clothes. He was in a stolen car and was planning to commit several serious crimes. He wanted someone to say, _stop_.

He felt a little pain at both of his temples.

Maybe it was stress. He shifted into high gear.


	7. Zombieland

_Lawdon, North Carolina  
9:25 a.m._

He thought it would be difficult to find: a small, cramped office in an abandoned building, or maybe one of those portable military bases they put in airfields and fairgrounds—a fly-by-night operation.

Instead he rolled off the highway and onto a two-lane road that ran through a treeless Eastern Shore salt marsh. A few minutes later he passed a sign, _Welcome to Lawdon—Pop 25,000, _and then a wooden billboard, _Proud Headquarters of the Waddington Adhesives Corporation since 1968_, featuring a multiracial cast of grinning workers. The paint was bubbling and peeling. The highway dipped down to the ocean, which at that time and in that place was dark and still. Not a beach town, but a marsh town. The town hugged the highway, and in between the outer city limits and the sea was the factory.

It was huge. It wasn't a factory but an industrial operation: manufacturing, shipping, serious logistics. You could see the whole story in the campus. Solid corporate ambition, a well-planned town growing up to house thousands of workers, decades of prosperity, _a great place to raise kids_. Then a sudden decline. A rash of unexplained illnesses, maybe, or a savings-and-loan bust, or a hostile corporate takeover. Then the sudden evaporation of everything, followed by a costly closure by the EPA. The jobs and prosperity gone, the retirement fund gone, the town, essentially gone. Maybe it had all been an illusion in the first place.

An old American story.

Mulder pulled over about half a mile away and stepped out of Winn's BMW to inspect the place and snap a few pictures, thinking _gone but not forgotten_. There was a new and well-maintained chain-link fence, capped with barbed wire. There was a heavy gate, which was closed, and a manned guardhouse. Every twenty feet was a security camera and what the Army called a _tipsy_, a TPS motion detector. There were signs chained to the fence. He couldn't read them from here, but the letters were in red and black. No doubt they warned of the spectacular risk to life and limb associated with entering a Superfund site. There was still a faint chemical tang in the air, mixing with the dead-fish stink of low tide.

Well; that was an old American story too. The cleanup of Superfund sites was a federal responsibility, and a secure industrial operation in the hand was worth two in the bush. He collected his gear and jogged along the edge of the highway, shearing off before the approach to the gate and the guardhouse. He shivered as he walked. It wasn't raining particularly hard, but the clouds were thick and low, and it was unseasonably cold. He did not take any special precautions as he approached the fence. Even with the Lone Gunmen's help, there wasn't much you could do about things like motion detectors.

Getting _in_ had never posed special problems for Mulder.

He stared up at the camera for a moment, then carefully took hold of the insulated end of the bolt cutters. He slammed the metal end against the fence. When it didn't spark, he grasped the links. They were ice-cold, but they didn't shock him. Quickly he snapped several links and opened up a gap in the fence. Now he was standing in a large and poorly maintained parking lot. An ocean of cracking tar, yellow marsh grass growing up to knee height. The nearest building, a gray warehouse, was a long way away. A shooting gallery.

He glanced back over his shoulder and took a sedate walk to the only vehicle in the lot, a deuce-and-a-half. It was abandoned, too—part of the old Waddington operation, not the DARPA operation. It sat on its rims, the tires long deflated, the windows shattered, and it was covered in rust. It would probably be there until the end of history itself. Mulder took one turn around it and hopped up once to look in the bed. Finding nothing, he drew out his gun, tipped the clip out of it, and put the clip in his pocket. He put the gun on the ground. He took out his FBI badge and put it on the truck's front bumper. Then he hopped up to sit beside it. He put his hands on his knees and watched the seagulls.

It took about five minutes. A single Jeep peeled out from the area behind the guardhouse and zipped toward him. Not the best security operation Mulder had ever seen. He could have gotten to the gray warehouse in five minutes. Two years ago, he would have tried. Not today. Today, the buildings held almost no interest for him. He wanted to observe the inhabitants.

The Jeep was Desert Storm brown, and inside were three burly MPs, two black and one white, all of them with the same expressions and haircuts and attitudes and sidearms. When he could see the whites of their eyes, he hopped off the truck, kneeled on the tarmac and folded his hands behind his head. He made a flip comment about taxpayer dollars and the cost of securing a Superfund site these days, and they ignored him. His badge and gun caused them a bit of consternation, but since he had blatantly violated both the perimeter and federal law, they arrested him. It was, Mulder realized, the eleventh time he'd been arrested on government property since the beginning of his X-Files career. He judged these guys as pretty rough for local cops but about average for MPs; he got away with a scrape on his chin, one on his ankle, and his fingers tingling because they secured his hands behind his back with a plastic ziptie. _Eight out of ten_ was the score he gave them as they trundled him into the back of the Jeep.

He did not envy their paperwork.

#

They took Mulder to what must have been the Waddington Adhesives administrative offices, once upon a time. It was a long, low brick building. The campus didn't seem to have an actual jail. Instead, they brought him to an unheated conference room, where he refused to talk to the MPs. Then they took him to a small office, where he refused to talk to a lieutenant who wore a Navy uniform. Then they took him to a slightly larger office, where he refused to talk to a captain. After that they locked him in a bathroom for a while, while they either figured out what to do with him, made the obligatory call to D.C., or both. The toilets didn't flush, the windows had bars over them, and Scully wasn't there. At that point he was damp to his bones, but there was nothing to do but wait.

It had taken Mulder a while to see it, and he'd been looking for it. All the people who worked at the facility were men. That wouldn't have been remarkable even ten years ago, but these were the enlightened nineties and they were not in combat or on a submarine. You expected at least one junior officer or clerk… or scientist. And then, of course, the men were all done in the style of the MPs who had arrested him. Not one of them looked a day over twenty-five. Not one of them had a single cut or bruise or blemish. Not a pimple or a shaving nick among them. All of them were built like pro basketball players, lean, quick and well-muscled.

Mulder's inner skeptic answered this observations with a sort of shrug. _So what?_ This was the military, after all. Recruitment favored young men in good health, and it wasn't like they were in a war. The confirmation, as far as Mulder needed it, was in their faces, and most especially their eyes. With the first three guys, it could have been training, but he soon learned that they were all like that. The whole Wickham operation was like that. Six weeks of boot camp added just a thin veneer of discipline over the fundamental humanity of soldiers, but not here. Make a joke or a sudden move, complain about the service, demand your Constitutional rights: nobody laughed, nobody rolled his eyes, nobody got pissed off. How likely was it that you would be in the presence of a squad of young soldiers and not meet a single slacker, clown or jerk?

You'd have better luck in a room full of Ken dolls. It was weird.

One of the reasons Mulder had had such a spectacular—if brief—career in profiling, and the reason he still had one of the FBI's best case-closure rates today, was that he didn't let things like improbability get in the way of his assessment of reality. In his experience, lots of things were totally impossible right up until the moment they punched you in the face. So he started with conclusions and worked backwards. Or he started with a conviction and built a case around it.

He preferred '_what if…'_ to '_and so…'_

Back at NC State, the Applied Atomic Sciences group had been engineering plants to be free of wheat rust. A humanitarian mission. But what if you could use the same technology to make _people_ stronger and healthier? What if you could have a generation of soldiers who didn't get sick, or who had extraordinary strength and endurance... or who were never in danger of suffering from moral anxiety or combat stress?

Of course the military wouldn't want to wait eighteen or twenty years to see if such a thing were possible. The next war might be over by then. Or the test subjects might turn out like Jiang's leaf, twisted and shriveled. Useless. There was another way. Mulder knew a bit about research into genetic engineering, and he knew that you could use a virus to insert a piece of genetic code into a cell. So what if they had used Frohike's flu virus to rewrite these soldiers' genetic codes? Anyone who got sick would become deathly ill, like Wickham and Winn. But some—soldiers, who were already especially healthy, or who had been prepared in some other way—some might survive it. The whole scheme was very unlikely, but in Mulder's opinion it was a great deal less likely than the idea that any army would pass on an opportunity like that.

He shivered. In a world where chimpanzees and humans shared ninety-nine percent of their genetic code, how different would someone have to be before you started talking about a different _species_? And what if it had gotten out among the population? That wasn't the worst thing he could think of.

The worst thing…

He went over to the bathroom mirror and looked himself in the eye. If he was honest with himself, he looked pretty lousy. He'd been going for more than twenty-four hours, and he hadn't stopped for things like food and hygiene. But breathing was good—no cough or congestion. He didn't feel feverish. He was all right.

If it was out there, worst thing wouldn't be catching it yourself. One way or another, that wouldn't matter much. The worst thing would be the moment you looked across the office or the bedroom or the living room and saw someone you loved transformed into something else.

He kicked the door. He started a little ruckus. "Hey! Open up out there!"

A moment later, one of the dead-eyed automatons opened it.

"I'm ready to talk," Mulder said. "I want to speak to your commanding officer."

One minute later, someone came with a pair of wire cutters and released Mulder's hands. As he rubbed the feeling back into them, he deposited himself in a leather chair in a large corner office that must once have belonged to Mr. Waddington himself. It was now the domain of one Major Mike Kovach, once of the United States Army and now head zombie of the zombie corps.

#

"I'd like my gun and my badge back," Mulder demanded. He had decided to do it the FBI way. His authority was like a slingshot compared to DARPA's cannon, but the sooner they could steer this whole mess down official channels, the more likely it was that Mulder would make it out of here alive.

"And you will have them," Kovach promised, "when you leave this facility."

Mulder said, "I'm here on official business."

"What business?"

"I have reason to believe that you're holding an FBI agent against her will."

Kovach had no reaction to that. He didn't claim innocence, he didn't press an intercom button and say _bring Agent Scully to my office_, none of the things Mulder expected.

Mulder said, "Is she here?"

"I'm sorry," said Kovach. "We don't take prisoners." He gestured to the door. "You're free to go." Perfectly calm. "Sergeant Hansen will drive you back to the gate."

Mulder stayed where he was.

Kovach said, "If we could prove that your colleague isn't here, would that satisfy you?"

Mulder answered honestly. "I doubt it." He took a deep breath. "But it would help."

He looked into Kovach's pleasant, empty, Ken-doll face. Another man, a normal man, threatened with exposure of this depth and nature, might show some signs of stress or panic. Maybe he would have Mulder killed or thrown in a brig forever. But if they were holding Scully here, the most rational reaction would be to release her, kick them both out, and hope there was no legal, political or investigatory blowback. After all, how many FBI agents could you disappear before the cover-up drew more attention than than the crime? Mulder had always known that, but this was the first time he'd come across a military bigwig that knew it just as well.

Kovach rose and gestured for Mulder to follow him. He turned out to be about an inch shorter than average. Not completely perfect after all. He followed Kovach to another desert-tan Jeep, which was being driven by one of the MPs who'd arrested Mulder in the parking lot. Kovach got in the passenger seat. Mulder hesitated, then got in the back. The Jeep rumbled and the MP pressed the gas. They turned, not toward the gate, but toward the inner sanctum of the Waddington Adhesives Corporation.

#

Several hours later, Mulder was as sure as anyone could be that Scully was not there and had never been there. He was still at square one on that. But he was deeply troubled, anxious and unsettled in his mind. Normally he was an eager consumer of the truth, but the last two days had left him at a loss, and now he felt he had been made to witness an atrocity. Mulder did not comment on his suspicions, preferring to let them percolate, and Kovach revealed nothing—naturally. Mulder was still a spy and an unwelcome guest here.

But still. Mulder knew what he had just seen.

The MP had driven them from building to building, and Mulder had been given the rare privilege of being permitted by these armed soldiers to get out of the car and search each one to his satisfaction. He did not find his partner. But he did find ample evidence that a large and expensive project, of both a military and medical nature, had been conducted at the Superfund site. It was now being dismantled piece by piece, the pieces loaded in trucks, the trucks all headed west. Men had lived here for some time, in barracks. There had been a well-equipped hospital suite and a library and an industrial kitchen. An armory.

A morgue.

There was housing here for something like two hundred men, but there were only about fifteen or twenty working at the site, including Kovach and the MPs, and they were all the same, as long as you disregarded the little details like hair and eye color. Mulder asked what happened to the others, and Kovach said they'd been reassigned. Mulder asked where, and Kovach refused to reply. There were rooms full of file cabinets, and computers, but the file cabinets that Mulder opened were unlocked and empty, and the hard drives were gone. The only factory in town, going out of business all over again. _An old American story. _

What had prompted this sudden dismantling? Not Wickham's death. This had been going on for more than a few days. They'd moved heavy equipment out of here.

Some of the buildings still smelled sharply of industrial glue, and Mulder got light-headed and his ears started ringing. But he kept going. He followed the trail all the way out to the seawall, and when he got there, he sat on the edge and took deep breaths. At several points he had needed Scully's expertise and missed it, but what he missed most was her steadiness, her moral conviction, her organized and scientific perspective. It all seemed a bit cold and nightmarish without someone to catalog and verify it with him, to process it into reality. And of course there was the question of what was happening to her right now. He could no longer tell himself, _I'm sure she's all right._

The soldiers waited politely a few feet away until Mulder rose and approached them. It was two o'clock in the afternoon and Mulder had done a job on the chemical plant. No team of Quantico recruits could have searched it better.

He had been honest with Kovach before and saw no reason to stop. It wasn't as if Kovach was going to react badly to the news. "I've got another problem to deal with. But I'm coming back here. Soon. Tomorrow. With FBI people."

Kovach folded his hands behind his back. "You found evidence of a crime?"

"I found enough." Mulder wondered if that was true. Maybe—if he could convince a dive team to drag the plant's water-reclamation tanks.

"But you're satisfied now," said Kovach. "You'll leave willingly."

"I've got someplace to be," Mulder said.

Kovach nodded. Hands still folded behind his back, he glanced over Mulder's shoulder and cocked his head about half a millimeter. Mulder barely picked up on it. It was a command, intended for the Jeep driver. The blow came out of nowhere. It was a hard-driving thing.

Mulder went down like someone had clicked the remote and turned him off.


	8. The escapee

_5:57 p.m._

In his ears, a snuffling.

Mulder peeled open his eyes and looked into a giant mouth. Also, teeth. From the mouth came a thick pink tongue, which slapped him across the face. Awareness dawned. He was lying on his back on a hard wooden bench. He dropped his feet to the sidewalk, sat up, and regretted it. Everything around him swam. His stomach churned. His head throbbed. He groaned, rested his forearms on his knees, buried his face in his hands, and made a heroic effort not to throw up. He felt like he had an icicle jammed in the right side of his head.

A high-pitched voice said, "Hey, man, you don't look so hot."

Mulder turned—grimacing—and squinted at a pretty teenager of about fifteen. Her hair was a mess of dreadlocks, one half dyed neon pink, the other bright blue. Her eyes were green. She wore a worn-out winter coat that was too large for her, and she was tethered an elderly Rottweiler by a green leash. They both looked hungry and neglected. After the cold strangeness of the zombies at the Superfund site, she seemed warm and real. She cocked her head at him.

Still gripping his throbbing temples, he glanced up at the sign looming over his head. BUS STOP. They'd dumped him in bustling downtown Lawdon. He blinked a few times and looked out at the horizon. He could just see the Superfund site in the distance, lit up with orange lights. He was on the wrong end of twilight. He'd been out cold for something like three and a half hours.

The girl raised an eyebrow. "Did you get mugged?"

"Unh." Mulder cleared his throat.

She tucked a pink dreadlock behind her ear. She scuffed the sidewalk with a neon-green sneaker. "You should watch out. This is a high-crime area. That's why I got Bruno here. I mean, all he'll do is slobber you to death, but people don't know that."

_High-crime area._ Mulder startled and began patting his pockets. He found his gun tucked safely in its holster. His badge and wallet had been crammed into in one pants pocket, the keys to Winn's BMW in the other. Okay. He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. Okay. The whole right side of his face rang with pain, like he'd been hit with a two-by-four. Both his lip and his nose were still trickling blood, and he'd left a pretty impressive pool of it underneath the bench.

The girl watched him with increasing alarm. "Oh my God. You need a doctor."

"It's fine." He wiped his face with his sleeve and tried to wave her off. "I work for the FBI."

"Yeah, sure." The girl broke out a tender, indulgent smile. "And I'm the First Lady. Look, I don't, like, _hang out_ with old guys. But you really shouldn't be in this neighborhood." She took a wad of money from one of her coat pockets. Crumpled, damp ones, a fistful of quarters. She turned his hand over and folded his fingers over the cash. Her hand was freezing.

For a moment, Mulder just stared. "I don't need money."

The girl pointed. "Pay phone." She pointed again. "Diner. Call somebody, get something to eat, go home. And maybe lay off the booze or the smack or whatever. It's not doing anything for you."

His savior shook her head and trotted off.

#

Mulder shook his head, looked down at the little pile of cash, then staggered over to the pay phone and fed it a quarter. He pressed his head against the cool metal case and dialed the number for the Whispering Pines Motor Court.

It rang eleven times. Then: "Identify yourself."

"It's me," Mulder said.

On the other end, Frohike announced, "It's Mulder."

"Your flu," said Mulder. "If I had it, I'd have it by now, right?"

"I don't know," said Frohike. "I guess."

Mulder closed his eyes. "What's going on in Raleigh?"

"What do you mean?"

"Any kind of official activity? CDC?"

"No, it's been quiet. Even the police radio." Frohike chuffed. "Even the ham radio."

"OK," said Mulder. "I'm in the place. Lowdown. Lawdon."

"Did you find her?" Frohike probed.

"No."

"I'm telling you. She was there."

Mulder nodded. "She's here now. I'm this close."

"What are you gonna do?"

"Well." Mulder cleared his throat. He turned around and leaned against the phone and looked up at the darkening sky. "I'm going to buy a cup of coffee and drink it. Then I'm going to call Skinner. It's getting beyond me." Frohike didn't say anything about that, which was kind of him, since the whole situation had gotten beyond Mulder sometime between Wickham's death and Winn's. "We're going to have to run it like a kidnapping. Door-to-door." He looked both ways down the street. Tactically, it was a disaster. Every second building was abandoned. The infrastructure hadn't been maintained at all. It was ten times worse than a gunfight in a parking garage. The FBI would have to _invade_ the place. "This town sucks."

"What do you want us to do?"

"Are the burner phones still on?"

"Hold on." Frohike put down the phone.

Silence. Some distant clicking.

Langley picked up the line. "No, they got wise when they hit Lawdon city limits."

"Did they buy the phones in the city?" Mulder asked. "Or here?"

Langley passed the phone to Byers. "Raleigh."

"OK," said Mulder. "I'm going to call you back in one hour."

Frohike again. "Mulder—"

"Yeah."

He hesitated. "We're worried. About both of you."

"Don't be," Mulder said. "I'm great. Aces."

Before Frohike could say anything else, Mulder hung up.

#

There were only a few people in the diner, and they worked there: a waitress, a cashier and a fry cook. They were all middle-aged and looked like they'd been squeezing a thin living out of this place for the last twenty years. They stared at him like they were afraid he was going to stick them up. He held out his money, asked for a glass of ice water, a cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie.

The waitress said, "You want your pie heated up?"

"Sure."

She brought him the ice water first, and he soaked a handful of paper napkins in it and pressed them to his face. He showed her his badge, which settled her down a bit and reduced the likelihood that he would be arrested by city cops and MPs in the same day. That would have been a record, even for Mulder.

"What do you know about the chemical factory?" Mulder said.

The name on the waitress's tag was: JANINE. "Nobody goes down there anymore. They say you can get cancer."

"But somebody still works there."

Janine shrugged.

"Who do you think it is?" Mulder asked.

"Superfund guys? The EPA? The National Guard? Feds—like you. They come down here sometimes. Nobody's going to say no to business." She placed a small plate in front of him, with a small triangle of pie. "Even that business. But they keep to themselves. Nobody really wants to talk about it. The town blames them for what happened."

"Do you?"

Janine shrugged again. "Somebody broke the law. Somebody got caught. Is that the law's fault? I don't know." She put a cup of coffee in front of him, and a little dish with plastic cups of creamer in it, and a container of sugar. "My real opinion is there's too much trouble in the world without going to look for it."

That was a life philosophy Mulder had never seriously considered before. He smiled, in a tense, social way, took his plate and settled in at a booth. The pie was hot and sweet and it was the first thing he'd eaten since breakfast yesterday morning. It occupied his full attention.

He didn't look up until a shadow fell across his plate. A man had taken the seat across from him. He was a young, trim Hispanic man, neatly and casually dressed, but with a hard expression. He was in very good health, considering that they were sitting in the middle of an environmental and moral disaster. Mulder put down his fork.

"You're him," said the man. "Aren't you? You came. You really came."

His eyes were like mirrors. No depth at all.

#

He said his name was Brian Alvarez, and that he was AWOL from the U.S. Navy. Five days ago, three of them had fled the Superfund site, with the support and assistance of the project's head nuclear scientist, Chandler Wickham. They didn't know where to go or what to do, only that to remain would be a disaster beyond imagining.

They had volunteered for the project out of patriotism, or a love of adventure, or even for the hazard pay. It wasn't a trick. They were young men, but they were soldiers and had gone into it with their eyes wide open. They had been told that they were joining a top-secret Special Forces unit. He knew that the group was involved in secret tests, tests that had a real risk to life and limb. It was a volunteer military and they had signed up to go to war. How was this any different?

They soon found out. Not long after the camp had been established, a strange and severe illness had begun to spread among the troops. You got delirious and crazy. You felt certain you were going to die. Some of the guys had. How many? A lot. And the men who came through it were… different. Better, in some ways.

Worse, in others.

In the throes of his illness, Alvarez had prayed to God, and he had survived. "But it's like… like the world turned black-and-white, Agent Mulder." He held his thumb and index finger a few inches apart. "Or like on the TV, when they do the letterboxes. That's what happened to us." He had never again felt completely whole. His former faith no longer provided him any comfort or answers. He didn't feel afraid of anything. He stopped having dreams—and nightmares. "It's not right, sir," said Alvarez. "We can't think anymore. We can't even think. It's messed up."

Not everyone felt like they had lost something, but Wickham helped the few survivors who did.

Once they had snuck off the base, they had gone into hiding in Lawdon, but planning the next step was difficult. It was easy to work together, to take quick and decisive action. If someone had told them to attack a building, they would have known exactly how to handle it. But they had lost the imagination and insight necessary to weigh options and make a plan. The could plot out the pros and cons of certain things, but had no way of measuring the value. Nothing scared them and nothing excited them.

They had depended greatly on Chandler Wickham. Wickham had never been infected. He had continued working at the Superfund site, looking for other ways to get men out of the project. It was Wickham who had come up with Scully's name. An old college friend. A medical doctor who worked special cases for the FBI. Someone who could be counted on to understand what had happened and deal with the issue discreetly. Someone with political connections.

Mulder imagined what Wickham must have been going through. He had created these monsters and now he had to care for them, in a very real and grinding way. Protect them from threats, finance their escape, provide leadership and moral guidance. Like a parent. Wickham would never be able to tell anyone about it, and these men's lives depended entirely on his judgement. The burden must have been extraordinary.

"And then," said Alvarez, "he caught it."

Maybe it was a lab accident, or maybe the other men had found him out and infected him deliberately. The moment he began to feel ill, Wickham would have known what was coming. He would have known that he only had a few hours left. Maybe a day. One day of moral insight. One day of humanity. Calling Scully was a wise way to spend that time.

But Scully had arrived too late.

The Superfund men had known that Wickham was unlikely to survive the infection. They also knew that the risk of exposure—not just of the project, but of their own escape—was great. They were very good, tactically. They had been thoroughly trained on the need for operational security. This was exactly the kind of problem their new minds had been designed to deal with. They had followed Wickham, in order to clean up the mess, like good soldiers.

And how did good soldiers handle a mess? Mulder felt a cold fog fill him up. He tried not to be angry. To lash out at these men was wrong. They had done what they were designed to do. They were the weapons, not the triggermen.

Toy soldiers.

"Alvarez," he said, struggling to rise above his emotions.

"Yessir," said the young man.

"Is Agent Scully alive?"

Alvarez blinked. "Huh?"

Under the table, Mulder made a fist. "Did you hurt her?"

"Oh." He gave Mulder a meaningless, strange, empty smile. "Nosir. Not a bit."

Mulder was not entirely sure he had heard that correctly.

"She's with us, sir," said Alvarez. "Just around the corner."

"'With us?' What the hell does that mean?"

"Chandler was our officer," said Alvarez. "He made the strategic decisions. And he's dead."

In a flash, Mulder understood. "No way."

Alvarez shrugged.

"No _way_," Mulder repeated.

Alvarez leaned forward. "We've been waiting for someone to come and tell us what we're supposed to do."

He looked at Mulder with childlike trust.


	9. King of the pod people

Alvarez led Mulder to an industrial squat on the opposite side of the street from the Lawdon diner. He shot one thousand-yard stare down the road, then took a small silver key from his pocket and opened a metal door. The building had once housed a convenience store, but it had gone under when the town went under. Wickham's soldiers weren't the first people to squat here, and they wouldn't be the last. The windows had been blacked out with boot polish and the garage's doors. There were rags and candle stubs and empty booze and chip bags on the floor. It smelled of motor oil, poverty and inadequate ventilation.

Alvarez led him through the convenience store and through another metal door that was partially eaten away by rust. On the other side of the door was a small garage. The doors had been boarded shut. Inside were two men: one very young, practically a boy, sitting on a bucket, with a rifle slung over his shoulder; the other in his mid-twenties, solid, dull-eyed and casual, cleaning his fingernails with a short knife. Both looked up, but neither one startled when Mulder and Alvarez came in.

But Scully did.

She was sitting on a threadbare couch that sat against the far wall, pretending to read a paperback book. She looked unhurt—and possibly _unharmed_, though it was sometimes difficult to tell with Scully. When she recognized him, the book slipped from her hands, and a complex series of emotions crossed her face: relief, affection, worry.

They hadn't even tied her hands.

#

For about twenty seconds, Mulder got really ridiculously stupid. His thoughts slowed to a crawl and the slight ringing in his ears became difficult to ignore. The edges of his vision went blurry.

Maybe she saw it, or maybe she just had her own agenda weighing on her mind, because she leaned forward slightly and said, "_Fox_."

Scully never called him by his first name. He snapped back into the moment, feeling his crisis training take over. He couldn't afford to feel anything close to relief. He needed to be absolutely focused and organized. They were now in the middle of what could quickly transform into a very complex and dangerous hostage situation. If Mulder was right about what was going on here, then these men were the opposite of a guy like Duane Barry. They would never act out of anger, spite or fear. But that didn't make them predictable or stable. For them, the use of violence would depend on a cost-benefit analysis that Mulder could neither understand nor predict. It didn't conform to the normal rules of psychology. In fact, Mulder had been on firmer ground with Duane Barry. But the similarities did not escape him. Neither did the potential outcomes.

Scully kept trying to get his attention. She sat bolt upright and tapped her fingers on the table, her jaw set.

Quantico had been fairly clear on how to deal with these types of incidents. Be deferential, but don't simper. Humanize yourself, but don't turn into teacher's pet. Give the hostage-taker an out; don't escalate the situation. The problem was, if Mulder asked for permission to take Scully and leave—if he asked these guys' permission to do _anything_—it would change the power dynamic. He had come in here as an authority. He still had his gun. All that _what's-your-name-sir _and _we-all-want-the-same-thing-here_ stuff wouldn't fly.

If he started acting like a hostage, they might start treating him like one.

So he didn't ask permission, but he did change the situation. He glanced once around the room—to make sure he hadn't missed anything—and sat beside his partner. Was that an escalation? He had come all the way into the room, which suggested a personal investment, and he'd sat down, which suggested he might be here for a while. On the other hand the world always seemed slightly more sensible when he looked at it from this perspective.

Her book was sitting open on the table.

She said, "What happened to you?"

"Nothing." He leaned over to look at the title page. _Success in the 90s: Proven Strategies for Professional Women. _He chewed his lip. "Just getting my ass kicked across North Carolina."

"Uh-huh. What did they use, a brick? Are you dizzy? Nauseous?"

"I'm fine." He paused. "My ears are ringing."

"I bet."

He could tell she wanted to do something for him. He didn't mind. He was feeling pretty pathetic and wouldn't mind being fretted over. But there were unspoken aspects to this conversation. Superscript and subscript. Mulder was paying close attention to the men and learning all about success in the 90s, while keeping pace with the conversation. He realized his hands were shaking.

So did she. She slipped her fingers between his and murmured through her teeth. "You are in _outer space_ right now. What is going on out there?"

Winn, her bloodshot eyes an indictment; Jiang's twisted leaf; _You don't want to be patient zero in a global epidemic_. "Later."

"OK," she said. "But settle down."

Scully. Now there was a person who deserved to have only good things happen to her for the whole rest of her life. Not because of her intuition—though that could be very subtle, when she got out of her own way. Because while she steadied him with one hand, she rested a finger on her book.

It was covered in dense writing. Every inch of empty space on the inside cover and title page was covered with neat, dense notes. A brief first-person account of Wickham's death. Descriptions of the men. A time log. And her personal notes and observations. Her own mini X-File. The sentence she was pointing at was: _Mulder there is something __medically wrong__ with them_. Underneath she had slipped into medical jargon, noting a _substantial impairment of executive function—suggests significant/diffuse neurological damage—Gulf War Syndrome? _

He shook his head. He found the pen she'd been using and wrote, IT'S POLITICAL.

Scully's look said: _What does that mean?_

"I'll show you," he told her. "I need a phone."

She blinked and spread her hands. _So do I. Welcome to this situation. So glad you could join me._

He turned.

Wickham's soldiers were watching them like it was some kind of TV show.

"I said, I need a phone," Mulder repeated. He snapped his fingers and extended a hand. "Look, kids. I'm not really interested in handling your problems until somebody does something about mine. So unless one of you puts a phone in my hand _right_ _now_…"

The men exchanged a three-cornered glance. Then Alvarez took a cheap-looking cell phone from his pocket and placed it in Mulder's open hand.

Mulder pressed the _on_ button.

Then he hesitated. 911 would bring cops, ambulances, and a bloody firefight, just in time for the nine o'clock news. _Two FBI agents were slain in a bizarre incident…_ Not good enough. Next on the list: an FBI crisis response team. They could be here in half an hour, but that meant a SWAT team, klieg lights, a chopper, a team of professional negotiators. And they be really pissed if they didn't get to shoot or arrest somebody by dawn.

Well. There was always Skinner.

Scully was staring at him.

"They want what everyone wants," he explained. He put his feet on the table and leaned back. He closed his eyes. His head still throbbed in time with his pulse but he felt easy and calm, skating over the surface of a dark pool. He did enjoy pulling a rabbit out of his hat for her every now and then. She let go of his hand, and he opened his eyes halfway. "Someone to tell them the right thing to do."

He made a decision and dialed.

#

_Raleigh, North Carolina  
7:05 p.m._

Starvation set in around dinnertime, which posed a problem, since they had planned for a conference and only packed a couple of jars of peanut butter. Frohike suggested pizza. That was a mistake. It stirred up the old debate about whether the pepperoni industry's connection to organized crime was more of a security risk or more of a social issue. If it was the former, all they needed to do was take the usual precautions. If it was the latter, then it was a question of whether the Lone Gunmen were more of a news organization or more of an ideological movement.

A large pepperoni pizza cost about fifteen bucks. Say a dollar of that went to the mafia. Did that compromise them? You know, _ethically? _

The positions were entrenched and battle lines drawn. Langley was a crusader, while Byers made a spirited case for engaging with some version of reality. Frohike sprawled on the bed, thumbed through _Forensic Pathology_, and sighed. Welcome to life as a professional paranoid in 1995. He wondered if Greenpeace got into these snits over genetically modified carrots. "Why don't we just order cheese?"

Byers and Langley stared at him.

Frohike lifted his head. "What did I say?"

A soft beeping noise interrupted them. By now there were half a dozen pieces of technology in the room that could make a noise like that. Frohike patted his pockets. Byers zeroed in on the ham radio—not Norma Jean, but the little one, the handy-talkie.

Langley won the prize. He said, "Huh. That's weird."

"What?" said Byers and Frohike at the same time.

Langley typed something into his laptop, smacked the case, then threw up his hands. "One of the burner phones just came back on."

"Just one?" said Byers.

The motel phone trilled. They all turned.

It rang again.

Pause.

Again.

"Well," said Frohike. "Who wants to pick it up?"

#

It rang thirteen times. Then Mulder heard the line connect. "It's me," he said.

Silence.

"I'm not kidding. Scully, tell 'em it's me." He held up the phone.

She folded her arms. "It's him."

Mulder clamped the phone between his shoulder and his ear. "How about that?"

Frohike said, "Wow. How'd she find you?"

Mulder rolled his eyes. "Do you still have that spare tank in the van?"

"We've got a functional range of two hundred miles."

"X marks the spot."

"We're on our way," said Frohike.

"Great," Mulder said, but Frohike had already hung up. Mulder put the phone in his pocket. "Scully, I have a question for you, and it's gonna sound a little crazy and maybe irrelevant, but just answer it."

"OK," she said, hesitantly.

"If these guys were sick, like with a virus, and then they got better, could they spread it now?"

"No," she said, eyeing the men. "Actually—no. If they were sick, but they aren't symptomatic anymore, then they'd be immune."

"They couldn't track it around on their shoes or something?"

"Well, that would depend on the virus," she said. "I mean if you're talking about something like a cold or… or the flu, then it can only live on surfaces for a few hours. Mulder—"

He held up a hand.

Alvarez slouched against the rusted door, looking nearly asleep. The kid with the rifle sat next to him, and the guy with the knife leaned against the wall. They read as a team but they were also difficult to engage. They defied empathy, even classification. _They want what everyone wants_, he'd told Scully, but that wasn't entirely true. The responsibility was bigger than that. They had a substantial impairment of executive function. They needed someone to _make decisions _for them. Eventually they would spiral out of control without an ordinary person at the helm.

When you were talking about trained killers, how could you abdicate a responsibility to be that person?

How could you _accept_ it?

"All right." Mulder took a deep breath. "Here's what we're going to do."


	10. Conflict resolution

She didn't believe him, of course.

When it was over they went back to the diner to wait. Scully wanted to put herself on the outside of a glass of ice water and Mulder wanted to see a newscast. At the bar he asked for an envelope. While Scully cleaned the booth with a napkin, he tore a page from the back of the self-help book and wrote directions to the place where he had left Winn's car. His handwriting was spindly and cramped, almost illegible. Not good. On the front of the envelope he scrawled _c/o Det. Peterson._ He put the page and the keys inside and asked one of the waitresses to make sure it got to the Raleigh Police Department. She took the letter and held it like it was stuffed with bad news.

Mulder sat in the two-person booth across from Scully and dropped his head on his folded arms. He was looking over her shoulder at the big TV in the corner. It was on CNN. Something about celebrities. He said, "Have you ever been to the state university here?"

She looked at him like he was at the bottom of a microscope. "Mulder, I barely know where we are."

"NC State," he clarified. "Cause I have. I went to see your friend Chandler Wickham's offices yesterday." He waited. She didn't say _who's Wickham._ So Mulder was right about that. "You know what he did for a living?"

"He was a physicist."

"Yeah," he said, yawning. "But not like you."

She chuffed. "Nobody's a physicist like me."

"Well, that's true." He scuffed the floor with his shoe. "Scully, I got a story for you."

He laid it out for her, sometimes trailing off for a moment when the story got ahead of him, then picking up again when she pushed him. She got that look on her face somewhere around Jiang's leaf_. _She drew back slightly and began to tap her fingers. When he had brought them up to the present she squeezed his knuckles, for just a second, like an apology.

He sighed. "You think I'm crazy."

She put her chin on her hand. "I think you're carrying around a lot of guilt about that Raleigh detective for no reason."

"Scully—"

"Mulder. The genetic science you're talking about is decades away from being a reality. And even if it _was_ possible, that's only the first hurdle. Gene therapy? Designer viruses?" She spread her hands in bafflement.

"Come on," he said. "Something happened here."

"Something." She leaned forward to look in his eyes. "You know I don't share this need that you have to tie it all up. I accept that there are things that we don't or can't understand. But that doesn't mean they're beyond comprehension." She held up her cup. "Take a scoop of water from the ocean. There's no fish in it. That doesn't mean fish don't exist." She put the cup down. "So we don't have the whole picture. That doesn't mean we can fill up the blank spaces with speculation and fantasy."

"But if it was real."

Her smile was more like a grimace.

Mulder held up his hand in surrender. "I'm just saying. _If_ it was real. We can keep working. We can—we can come back with more equipment. Quantico. The CDC." He hesitated. "Or we can go to the media."

A public exposé. The last bullet in the gun.

It was last bullet in the gun _for a reason_, which Scully never hesitated to remind him. She said, "And tell them what? That an army of genetically engineered killers are prowling the streets of Lawdon, North Carolina? That we need to quarantine a major metropolitan area because of a disease that was eradicated almost a hundred years ago? You know what they'd say. You know what they would do to us. To the X-Files."

He bit his lip. Sometimes she made him feel that his entire belief system was built of eggshell—not necessarily false, but thin and brittle.

At least she was gentle about it. She took a breath and softened her tone. "But if it is true then it's beyond me, and beyond you. It's already out there." She inclined her head at the window. "And it will prove itself. Today or tomorrow or a week from now. In the most public way possible." She lifted a shoulder, a gesture that indicated not carelessness, but resignation. "There either is no ballgame, or it's already over. I think you know that. Or else all of these things that you've done would be insanely reckless and dangerous."

"Yeah," said Mulder. "You're right. That doesn't sound like me at all."

She glanced at the waitresses. Twenty years of eking a meager living out of a dying town. "I wouldn't want to spend the apocalypse here, Mulder." She turned around and drew her feet up, leaning against the wall and settling in to the tiny booth. "And I would not want that for you."

She let her eyes go half-lidded. He saw how the stress of the last eighteen hours weighed on her.

"I'm tired," she pleaded. "Let's go home."

#

"Go home."

That was what Mulder had told the soldiers, after three five-minute clinical interviews.

The kid with the rifle was called Henry Clayton, and he was a nineteen-year-old private second class from Birmingham, Alabama. Back home, he'd lived in a three-bedroom apartment with his mother and two sisters. College ambitions had put him in the Army. The extra pay and a sense of adventure had brought him to the DARPA project. The older one with the knife was Eli Brinkman, but Alvarez had to introduce him, because he wasn't very good at conversation anymore. The full-sleeve tattoos on his arms proclaimed him to be a proud Marine, with a juvie record, who loved a girl named Julia, five years sober last November. A guy who had turned his life around about six years ago and was _never going back_.

Mulder felt that was likely. Brinkman had eyes like plastic buttons and trouble answering basic questions.

They were calm, untroubled, incurious, obedient men. But Mulder felt troubled and rebellious enough for all three of them. Behind the eyes of Clayton, Brinkman and Alvarez, Mulder saw the faces of the kind of monsters who thought they could order people off a menu: _punch up the reflexes, please, double the obedience and hold the morality_. One of those faces had belonged to Scully's college buddy, Wickham, who was cutting a less sympathetic figure with Mulder every minute.

Scientists, statesmen and generals never stopped trying to make people better. The inevitable was human wreckage on a scale that twisted everyone it touched. It turned witnesses into victims and victims into wraiths. There was no real justice here. Once again there were bloody fingerprints all over everything, but the doers exceeded both Mulder's reach and his grasp. All he ever got to see was the casualty list.

His father had been involved in projects like this.

There was a little beaten-up coffee table in front of the couch. He told them, "Leave your weapons here and go home. Do it now." He cleared his throat and glanced at Scully for a moment, feeling exposed. "Go to your families. Live your lives. Get help."

He felt Scully's eyes on him. She opened her mouth to say something and Mulder closed his hand on her wrist. _Wait._ The men broke down the weapons and put them on a table in the middle of the garage. One of them was Scully's neat little Sig Sauer. She watched it like it was a prize. She was ready to leap at them.

_Wait_.

He held his breath. The last one was Brinkman. He put his knife on the table.

"It's all right," said Mulder. "Don't pick it up again."

They did it. They laid their weapons down and left in a neat little line, closing the door behind them.

#

As soon as the latch clicked, Scully turned and inspected the bruise on the side of his head. She flinched. Then she was up and at 'em, assembling her gun in three quick moves. "Wait here. I'll be right back." She chambered a round.

He crossed his ankles on the table and paged through her notes. "Let 'em go."

"Have you lost your mind? Those men are dangerous and you've sent them back to their mothers and their girlfriends. For God's sake, Mulder, they could have children."

"It was the right thing to do," he said.

She scoffed. "For who? You?"

"The military sends them home." He held up her book and pointed at her own notes. _Poss. Gulf War Syndrome_. He raised his eyebrows.

She rolled her eyes. "That is not the same thing."

He pretended to read, not looking up at her, and spoke distantly. "Isn't it?"

"Oh please."

"Did they hurt you?" Mulder took out the little plastic burner phone. He thought of a number he'd memorized years ago, before he met Scully, when he was making some wise and prudent alliances with his father's friends in Congress. It was the kind of call you could only make once, and you'd better have a very good reason. He'd never planned to actually use it.

She folded her arms. "I think they just didn't think of it."

He stared at her over the edge of the book. "But they didn't. Hurt you."

"They frightened me. They committed federal crimes."

"OK."

"And they hurt you."

"Me? Nah. I tripped on the sidewalk."

She put one hand on her hip and lifted the other. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

He declined to answer. "Scully, there are two things I want right now: to see a newscast and tell you what happened. And in three minutes, that's what I'm going to do." He raised a hand to silence her. "Hold on."

"You look like you've been hit by a car," she informed him.

"You look great," he said. "I really missed you."

This time the phone only rang once.

"Red Line Industries," said a prim receptionist. "How may I direct your call?"

There was no Red Line Industries. There was a phone in a cloakroom, attended at all hours. Before the Berlin Wall came down, there were lots of those phones. One in the office of every committee chair. Now there were only two or three. The elaborate infrastructure of apocalypse prevention was slowly being consumed by the peace dividend. He cleared his throat. "This is Fox Mulder from the FBI. I'd like to leave an urgent message for Senator Claypool."

"F…B…I…" the receptionist murmured. "Regarding what issue, sir?"

"I want to know what provisions she's going to make for the military victims of the Waddington Superfund incident." A sentence that said, in the convoluted language of government: _I know all about it_ and _I'm willing to make a deal_.

"Waddington… Superfund…"

"I have some suggestions," said Mulder. "Assuming the world doesn't end tomorrow, she needs return my call." He rattled off the number of his basement office.

#

And they waited.

The streetlight outside the diner was flickering, making a light clinking noise that they could hear from the booth. The rain that had threatened earlier was now coming down in sheets. An old amiable silence had settled between them, given form and structure by their relationship; in a partnership like theirs even silence was a conversation. Looking at her he wondered what it would feel like to lose it all like Alvarez or Brinkman. Not just the insight and instincts that made him a good agent—sharpened and organized and clarified, it had to be said, by a deep and gnawing anxiety that never quite left him—but all of the little surprises and tensions of life. He was keenly aware of every little sound and movement around him, of the solidity of things. What would it be like to feel it all go dull, and watch its meaning leak away? There was no peace in the idea. To lose your life was a risk, acceptable and even obligatory under the right circumstances.

To lose your humanity didn't bear consideration.

He was so focused on the moment that he heard the VW before it rolled around the corner. He lifted his head. "It's our cab," he told Scully.

She snapped out of a reverie. "Hmm?"

The VW van rolled around the corner, parked underneath the streetlight and idled. Scully recognized it and tried to hide a strained smile.

"Come on," he said. "Let's go."

Mulder paid, and they left the diner and hopped into the middle seat of the van. It was damp and smelled of burning electronics. The back of the van was crammed with radio and electronic equipment, some of it running. On the bench seat in front of them, Byers was choosing between identical handheld radios. In the front passenger seat, Langley was fighting with a road map and a flashlight. He turned the map upside down and frowned. "No, really," he told Frohike. "I'm not kidding. Where are we?"

Scully gave Mulder a skeptical look as she buckled her seat belt.

Frohike was at the wheel, one hand on the shifter. He glanced at them through the rear-view mirror. "I think we broke a land speed record."

"Thanks for coming," said Mulder.

Langley muttered, "Whatever. This thing redlines at sixty miles an hour."

Byers sighed. "It's a figure of speech, Ringo." He fiddled with a TALK button, filling the van with a sharp burst of static. "Ouch. Sorry."

"Everything's a figure of speech," Langley sighed.

Byers furrowed his brow. "You know—that's kind of true."

Langley chuckled darkly. "Kind of."

Frohike said, "So, do you want to go back to the city or do you have a place set up for us here?"

Mulder didn't answer. Scully chose for them. "The city. D.C."

Frohike said, "You know that's like five hours. It'll be dawn."

"What?" said Mulder. "You've got plans?"

Frohike shrugged and put the van in gear.

It sighed, and creaked, and shuddered, and went.

#

Mulder tried to talk with Scully about her part in the mystery: Wickham's death, her captivity, what she had seen and done and thought about. At first he thought her long silences and single-word responses were evidence of deeper trauma than he had first guessed. Then he realized she was going easy on him. A lively conversation would hold his attention. Deprived of it, he drifted, his thoughts winding down and down.

If it ever really did come down to the end of the world, Scully would be fine. She certainly wouldn't lack for things to do. All his skills were made for civilization. He wasn't even a very good shot. He'd have to learn how to roll bandages or something.

God. His head felt like an oyster with a pearl in it.

It tested the terms of their arrangement, but he rested his head on her shoulder. When she didn't push him off, he closed his eyes. He heard his own metronome heartbeat in his ears. "What do we do now, Scully?"

"Shh."

He fell asleep wondering what the world would look like in the morning.


	11. 11:21

_October 30, 1995  
Washington, D.C._

Anxious, plinking guitar melodies, a driving baseline, sighing vocals; his music matched his mood as he turned the page. _…and renders the support for a match between the two markers ultimately inconclusive, as the following report demonstrates. _Mulder lifted the page and furrowed his brow at a sheet with dots on it. He sighed, set it aside, and cast around for the Bethesda scans. He found them under Scully's book: ghostly images of human brains, peppered with red arrows and handwritten notes. _…suggesting a pervasive congenital dementia that went undetected in previous service physicals… _He rubbed his eyes. …_recommending an immediate medical discharge due to __100%__ disability…_

Scully came in with a box on a cart.

Mulder watched over the edge of his reading glasses as she unpacked a brushed steel barrel that looked like it belonged in _Star Trek_. He raised his eyebrows as she plugged it into the wall and twisted the dials. He started to ask and she held up a finger. The barrel shuddered and made a noise like a hairdryer. A wave of warm air coursed across the floor and began to thaw his ankles.

"A space heater," Mulder said.

She turned down his music. "We are not going to freeze like last year."

"Is it that cold already?"

"Mulder, you could keep corpses in here. I had to scrape frost off the file cabinets."

"Huh."

She sat down across from him and gathered up one of the files. "What're you working on?" For a number of reasons, October was a dead time of year for the X-Files. You got hauntings in the spring, abductions in late summer and ritual murder in early fall. But nothing for Halloween. No tricks, no treats.

The report she'd picked up was a new VA clinical report on Eli Brinkman. He'd been hospitalized again and they were exploring long-term care. His diagnosis was the same as the others: idiopathic dementia undetected prior to service. It would have raised some questions in a Congressional investigation—if the disabilities were congenital, why were they receiving full combat pensions?—but then again, they were never going to have one.

"Ah." Scully's expression was noncommittal. "This again."

"Same old tune, Scully." He scratched his chin. "It's getting overplayed."

The Waddington plant had been abandoned by the time Mulder made it back. Nothing left but a few rusting cots and some scuffs on the floor. The town of Lawdon had received a fat Superfund compensation check and wasn't inclined to think deep thoughts about it. In the aftermath of Wickham's death, the bio-atomic research projects at NC State had been quietly defunded, the scientists shipped off to Los Alamos, where that trail went, rather predictably, cold. The examinations of Alvarez, Brinkman and Clayton were similar but inconclusive. There was clearly something very wrong with them, and what they had wrong was also what they had in common. But they weren't even in the same branch of service, and had never officially served in the same unit.

Detective Winn had died of what the CDC called a 'novel influenza,' and for a few days they had gotten really _upset_ about it. But with Wickham's body missing, there wasn't much to compare it with. The disease didn't spread and the epidemiological investigation faltered. No doubt there was an unheated basement office somewhere in Atlanta where strange cases went to die, but they weren't about to let Fox Mulder near it. Forty-five days later all that was left of the case were eighteen thick reports, the word _inconclusive_, and the pervasive stink of industrial glue.

Scully turned a page. "Yeah, I guess we should give up."

Mulder chuckled desperately.

She put the report down. "Have you ever heard of something called CIPA? I've been thinking about it lately."

He shrugged.

"It's an incredibly rare genetic disorder," she said. "It affects the autonomic nervous system. The patients are unable to feel pain." She shook her head. "They can't tell hot from cold. They can't cry or sweat."

He waited.

"It's almost always fatal," she said. "Often in infancy. The babies die of heatstroke, or they choke on food. It's terrible. These reports say your soldiers are like that, here." She touched her temple. "Mulder, if you can't feel fear or regret—or stress or anticipation—then you never know when you've gone too far. You can never guess what's going to happen next, or weigh two different values. You can't decide to decide what to eat for breakfast, much less when to shoot somebody. If _that's_ the future of the U.S. military then we'll never win another war. You know it, I know it, and I bet DARPA knows it too." For the last month, Jiang's twisted leaf had been sitting on Mulder's desk. She picked it up and turned it in the light. "Ultimately it's our fears and neuroses that save us." She bit her lip thoughtfully. "If it was an experiment, then it was a failure."

"Then they'll try again," Mulder said.

"So what if they do?" She clamped the leaf between two fingers, got up and crossed behind him. He had to swivel his chair to keep watching her. "They've been 'trying again' for fifty years." She shrugged. "They've probably been trying since Mary Shelley wrote _Frankenstein_." She surveyed his bulletin boards, that bird's nest of his favorite implausibilities. "She was right, you know."

She leaned over his shoulder to pluck a pushpin from the tray. As she reached, she tipped her head to speak in his ear. "The error isn't in the process. It's in the idea."

She pinned the leaf to the wall.

###

_Author's Epilogue  
_

_Clipped from Wisconsin Ag Connection, 29 September 2013:_  
_"Kenya Debuts Two Stem Rust-Resistant Wheat Varieties"_

_To counter the resurgence of wheat stem rust originating in neighboring Uganda, Kenyan plant breeders have introduced two new varieties resistant to this yield-robbing disease. The varieties were developed using a nuclear technique for crop improvement known as mutation breeding. By exposing seeds or plant tissues to radiation, scientists accelerate the natural process of mutation and are able to select and develop new varieties more quickly…_


End file.
